|
The joke is that it's Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, transmuted for the Seventies of systemic skepticism and allegorical boogeymen. (The Sixties are promptly dispatched in the prologue, with the hippie blonde ditching the stoned campfire for a grisly bit of skinny-dipping.) Summer dollars for a summer town, says the mayor of the beach community (Murray Hamilton), thus a marauding shark to spark the debate of private profit versus public safety. "A perfect engine, an eating machine, a miracle of evolution," still not enough to close the shores on the Fourth of July. Steven Spielberg is a fiend with the widescreen, using split diopter lenses to give the paranoid-distracted gaze of the police chief (Roy Scheider) until a child vanishes amid gory foam. The Everyman afraid of water ("There's a clinical name for it, isn't there?" "Drowning.") who must sail off into the oceanic void, flanked by the fancy-pants biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and the Hemingwayesque blowhard (Robert Shaw). Duel expanded, not a rusted grill but mighty, fishy mandibles from the depths, the Other for whom the heroes are nothing but chum. Hitchcock lessons for tension and release, for the exquisite timing of a chewed-up corpse intruding into the frame. Knife in the Water is a compositional model for the second half, with its parodic matching of macho scars while floating over the predator's territory. (The Lady from Shanghai is brought to bear upon the USS Indianapolis monologue.) "Whole sea's bones, full of 'em." Peekaboo with the toddler and peekaboo with the monster, Spielberg's humanism to go with his ruthless technique. The island that won't let a voracious behemoth get in the way of a holiday, the Great White at last unveiled like Lang's dragon (Die Nibelungen: Siegfried) as a beast-mechanism of nightmares. (Down its gullet goes Ahab, with an amplified crunch.) After the undulating arena of the boat, the shimmering womb of the spaceship. Cinematography by Bill Butler. With Lorraine Gary, Carl Gottlieb, Jeffrey Kramer, Lee Fierro, and Susan Backlinie.
--- Fernando F. Croce |