Not having
children is great. One of the many perks
is being able to do silly things like decide to buy loads of DVDs, arrange them
on the shelves chronologically and by director, and then decide on a whim that
you want to watch all of somebody’s films.
Steven
Spielberg was always my favourite. For as long as I can remember I’ve been
mesmerised by the things he puts on screen, the sheer magic he can conjure ,
and the way he can take you back to your childhood for a couple of hours. So, ironically, not having a child has
allowed me to indulge in some childhood regression by watching every Spielberg
film in order, and then writing about them in the time I’m not using to change
nappies and pretend to be a normal person.
Here goes nothing…
Not owning
(nor knowing how to get) copies of Firelight, Savage
or Something Evil, I’ve
started with the excellent TV movie Duel. While I distinctly remember conversations with my parents in which they
suggested that the devil himself was driving the truck, that fact that we don’t
know the driver’s identity is a stroke of genius. Dennis Weaver, playing the first of many
Spielberg ‘everyman’ characters (named Mann, as it happens), gives a great
performance as the not-entirely-likeable hero.
He’s something of a coward, has alienated his wife, and the film suggests
early on that he provokes the truck to begin with, but Weaver sells him with enough
conviction to carry the film as the sole character. I’ve
always maintained that the film would work with no dialogue at all, such is the
strength of the young Spielberg’s direction, using inventive shot choices and eking
tension from every possible source. He
certainly could have done without Mann’s internal monologue, which doesn’t
always work. For me, the truck is one of
cinema’s best monsters and while you can say that Duel is his audition for Jaws,
it’s clear from this that young Spielberg is both talented and evil.
The
lesser-known classic The Sugarland
Express is next. Starring a young, manic, and absolutely brilliant Goldie
Hawn, and William Atherton, who would go on to play the most annoying man in Die Hard, this film is way better than I
remember. It’s beautifully shot, shows much
of the flair we’ve come to expect from Spielberg, but this introduces a trope that
will recur time and again throughout his career: the fractured family
unit. From Close Encounters, Temple Of
Doom, Empire Of The Sun through
to aspects of Catch Me If You Can and
Bridge Of Spies, the broken and/or
surrogate family unit is something he goes back to again and again. Another thing worth noting here is that Sugarland is a caper so wilfully bizarre
and populated by idiots, the Coen brokers have been plundering it from Raising Arizona onwards. They have taste.
Jaws is next, and I don’t really need
to explain how good a film it is.
Spielberg understand the cardinal rule of monster movies: the monster is
scarier when you don’t see it. It’s
true, your imagination is way worse than anything that you can see on
screen. Keeping the shark hidden does
two things: builds the tension in your mind, and hides a limited budget. The best thing about Jaws is the characters: a social cross section of Richard Dreyfuss’
wealthy shark expert, Roy Scheider’s land-loving middle class cop, and Robert
Shaw’s unforgettable working fisherman. They are brilliant together, with
chemistry and tension in abundance. The scene where Shaw’s Captain Quint delivers
his USS Indianapolis monologue is stunning, and each of them has memorable
dialogue.
Jaws is the textbook monster movie, with
lessons for generations of directors to come.
It takes its time, particularly during shark attacks, allowing the scenes
to breathe and not letting the audience get disoriented like so many films do
today with A.D.D editing and emphasis on speed. Spielberg also understands that
this isn’t a film about a shark, it’s a film about people faced with difficulty,
and it gives you enough of those people to make you like and care about
them. But when the shark attacks do come,
they’re bloody, brutal, and still terrifying.
Spielberg
would hit all of the right notes again with Jurassic
Park, and most of them with War Of
The Worlds, but here he wrote the rulebook and in doing so invented the
very thing that would define his career for decades to come: the event movie.
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