Get your teeth into two Seventies’ classics
Jaws (12A) Verdict: Still bites Don’t Look Now (15) Verdict: As watchable as ever
A Pair of genuinely great and enduringly influential seventies films are re-released this week.
Those of us who went to the cinema as children to watch steven spielberg’s 1975 classic Jaws, about a great white shark terrorising a new england beach resort, will never forget its impact. For quite a while, not even swimming pools seemed entirely safe from the threat of a hungry man-eating shark.
oddly enough, a swimmingpool featured in one of Jaws’s most memorable moments. The scene where a decapitated head appears through a hole in a submerged boat is still the only time I’ve ever seen an entire audience jump out of their seats.
But when filming in new england had finished, spielberg wanted that scene re-shot.
To get it done without pushing the production even more wildly over budget than it already was, editor Verna Fields offered the use of her Californian pool.
A boat was duly sunk, the pool was covered in tarpaulin to make it look gloomy, and milk was chucked into the water to make it more eerie. That’s what we’re seeing in the famous underwater scene that scared the living daylights out of everyone.
Given such low-tech trickery, how does Jaws stand up in an age of CGI wizardry? remarkably well. sure, the shark looks a tad mechanical. But the film’s still a masterpiece of suspenseful story-telling, aided by John Williams’ brilliant score, ground out on a tuba.
The dynamic between marine biologist (richard Dreyfuss), grizzled shark-hunter (robert shaw) and police chief (roy scheider) is as gripping as it ever was (Dreyfuss and shaw loathed each other off screen even more than they did on, by the way).
THE on- and off-screen relationship between Julie Christie and Donald sutherland has always intrigued fans of nicolas roeg’s brilliant 1973 thriller Don’t
Look Now. It’s an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story about a couple who take a working assignment to Venice hoping to assuage their grief following the death of their young daughter, only to be haunted by what seems to be her ghost.
Throughout, not just in their celebrated sex scene (which has retained its erotic power after all these years), sutherland and Christie are extraordinarily convincing as a deeply wounded but loving married couple.
Venice meant a lot to du Maurier. It was the code word for her lesbian sex life (she used ‘Cairo’ for heterosexual lovemaking), and she must have been delighted by the way roeg depicted it.
Films in Venice (such as spider-Man: Far From Home) tend to lurch from one visual cliche to the next, but roeg was far cleverer. His Venice is still one of my favourite cinematic portraits of a city, up there with Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979).