Neal Romanek – words/pictures

Watching “Jaws” (1975) again, I am reminded – again – of how perfect a film it is. Performances, music & sound design, editing, and writing come together to make a masterpiece. In truth, none of these elements, by itself, is perfect in the film – close, but not quite. But somehow they were brought together, on a production where everyone was convinced they had a disaster on their hands, to produce one of the greatest horror movies and adventure movies ever.?

At night, aboard the fishing boat, Orca, our three heroes – Brody, a police chief afraid of water; Matt Hooper, a young marine biologist; and Quint, a seasoned shark fisherman – exchange comical stories about their scars.

When Hooper asks about the scar of a removed tattoo on Quint’s arm, actor Robert Shaw launches into one of his best scenes as an actor and one of the best monologues in movies:

QUINT: (pointing to the tattoo) That’s the U.S.S. Indianapolis.

HOOPER:  (breathless) You were on the Indianapolis?

BRODY:  What happened?

QUINT:  Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. thirteen-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know … was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away … but sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’ … until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then … ah, then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red. And despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and … they rip you to pieces You know, by the end of that first dawn, we lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Up-ended. Well … he’d been bitten in half below the waist. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot – a lot younger than Mr. Hooper here – anyway, he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know, that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway …
(with a smile – or a sneer?)
… we delivered the bomb.

My favorite filmmakers are my favorite filmmakers because they give me some new gift every time I revisit their work. So I find myself never able to stick with a permanent choice for My Favorite Film. It might be “Kagemusha” (1980) this month (I prefer the leaner American release version, I feel embarrassed to say), next month “Seven Samurai” (1954). “The Birds” (1963) this month, next month “North By Northwest” (1959). Usually, I will say that “Black Narcissus” (1947) or “Stairway To Heaven” (1946) (aka “A Matter Of Life and Death”) are my Powell/Pressburger films du mois. However, this mois, the movie in the #1 Archers spot is certainly “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (1943). “Blimp” is a film made with one foot in WWII-era British propaganda and the other wedged in between Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” and Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” (1962). It spans 40 years of a British soldiers life and covers everything from love to humiliation, honor to stupidity, idealism to self-delusion, Germany to England. And it features Deborah Kerr playing not just one mouth-watering female lead, but three.

The monologue below comes from our pompous hero’s best friend, the realist Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, superbly played by Anton Walbrook in a performance which spans 40 years of a character’s life.

In this scene, Theo, who has fled Nazi-controlled Germany, opens his tired, broken heart to an English Judge preparing to deny him asylum in England – homeland of his deceased wife, place of his incarceration in a WWI POW camp. The entire monologue takes place in a single shot on Walbrook, seated, leaning on his cane -

THEO: I have not told a lie. But I also have not told the truth. A refugee soon learns that there is a big difference between the two.

He pauses. The JUDGE nods.

THEO: The truth about me is that I am a tired old man who came to this country because he is homesick.
(he smiles)
Oh please don’t stare at me like that, sir, I am all right in the head. You know that, after the war, we had very bad years in Germany. We got poorer and poorer. Every day retired officers and schoolteachers were caught shoplifting. Money lost its value, the price of everything rose. Except of human beings. We read in the papers, of course, that the after-war years were bad everywhere, that crime was increasing and that the honest citizens were having a hard job to put the gangsters in jail. Well, I needn’t tell you, sir, that in Germany, the gangsters finally succeeded in putting the honest citizens in jail. My wife was English. She would have loved to have come back to England, but it seemed to me that I would be letting down my country in its greatest need, and so she stayed at my side. When in summer ‘33, we found that we had lost both our children to the Nazi Party, and I was willing to come, she died. None of my sons came to her funeral.
(eyes burning)
Heil Hitler … And then in January ’35, I had to go to Berlin on a mission for my firm. Driving up in my car, I lost my way on the outskirts of the city, and suddenly the landscape seemed so familiar to me. And slowly I recognized the road, the lake, and a nursing home, where I spent some weeks recovering almost forty years ago. I stopped the car and sat still – remembering. And … you see, in this very nursing home, sir, I met my wife for the first time … and I met an Englishman who became my greatest friend. And I remembered the people at the station in ‘19, when we prisoners were sent home, cheering us, treating us like friends … the faces of a party of distinguished men around a table who tried their utmost to comfort me when the defeat of my country seemed to me unbearable. And – very foolishly – I remembered the English countryside, the gardens, the green lawns,  the weedy rivers and the trees … she loved so much. And a great desire came over me to come back to my wife’s country. And this, sir, is the truth.

Silence in the schoolroom after THEO’S long speech. The JUDGE rises and walks round the table.