THE SCREEN: Brody and the Beast
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
BRODY AND THE BEAST THE SCREEN In laws II, Bruce the Shark eats a helicopter. It's the best thing in the film. I loved it. But getting his choppets on a chopper is only his piece de rdsistance....
...We get to watch him down all this script material, too, which means we are seeing a lot more of him this time than we did in the original laws, where he remained a mere dorsal fin until the end...
...Nevertheless, he at first appears to be the same incompetent outsider he was in the original film...
...In laws H, however, director Jeannot Szware seems to realize that, next to Bruce himself, the most incredible natural phenomenon the film has to deal with is Roy Scheider's face...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Like all good gangster movies, Jaws 11 ends with the tough cop sending the hood to the electric chair...
...For what is the only kind of knowledge that a teenager on summer vacation acquires...
...He's among the very young at heart...
...Now that we get to know Bruce a bit better, we see that he isn't a creature of nature at all...
...Since the fisherman died in the first laws and the zoologist is off making another picture, it's only natural that Brody should move to center-stage...
...Side views have been added to the frontal attack he made on us in the first laws...
...When he clambers down screaming from his shark look-out, clears the beach by rushing across it with his revolver drawn, and then empties the revolver into what someone finally tells him is a school of bluefish in the surf, the town council fires him...
...At the same time that we are getting many more glimpses of Bruce in action, we are also getting many long, lingering close-ups of Scheider as he looks out to sea, wondering what the hell Bruce will pull next...
...He shares with the kids something more profound than the abilities that the fisherman and the zoologist shared...
...His bungling and brashness alienate Amity's p0wers-that-be even more this time than last...
...While it may have been obvious by the time Brody went out with that zoologist and fisherman in Jaws that he didn't know a tenth as much as they did, by the time he goes out in laws H to rescue the teenagers, whose regatta is under siege by Bruce, it is just as clear that Brody knows precisely what these kids know...
...The kids are constantly ogling each other through their skimpy summer clothes, Frenehing behind the dunes, getting laid in the bottom of drifting boats, etc...
...As an ex-New York cop who was now the whole department on a little island, Brody was certainly out of his element...
...I think we were all surprised when Brody ended up being the one who was actually capable of killing the shark...
...And from the opening scene, where Brody pulls his wife away from a dinner dance so they can "fool around," the film is at pains .to make it clear that whatever problems he may have with sharks or oceans, in bed at least, he's not incompetent...
...The only thing he and the shark had in common was that we hadn't seen very much of either of them--they were mystery figures...
...This time we are hardly surprised at all when Brody gets his shark...
...If we see a good deal more of Bruce than we did last time, we also see more of his old nemesis, Amity Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider...
...Just as Brody flips out and has a fight with the mayor right in front of all the tourists on the beach in laws, so does he again in Jaws I1...
...In fact, Jaws 11 at first appears to be the original film all over again...
...But it soon becomes apparent that with the people Commonweal: 499 who really matter in this film--the local teenagers-Brody fits right in...
...Once he started sounding off about the shark problem, he was also on the outs with the local Chamber of Commerce...
...The sea-horse power in Bruce's underwater track has been increased as well, so now he can be goosed up to 40 m.p:h, when he's swimming flat out...
...In the original laws Brody seemed to be out of it most of the time...
...He has instinct, libido...
...In Jaws I1 he reminds us more of Scarface, on account of having eaten that burning gas can, but Brody is still wise to him...
...He is using bullets which we saw him tip with cyanide...
...It also becomes apparent in this film why Brody is the right man for the job of hunting Bruce...
...He is clearly a man who knows how to fight gangsters on their own terms...
...When Brody goes out to rescue those kids, even though he can't read the charts or figure out how to use the radio, we just know he's going to succeed anyway...
...And even when he finally got to go shark hunting, he still seemed the odd man out on a boat with a marine zoologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a professional fisherman (Robert Shaw) who both specialized in sharks...
...He's more of a gangster, just the sort of amoral thug that it takes a streetwise ex-cop from New York to deal with...
...Even at the height of his incompetence, when he's taking pot shots at bluefish, we can see that deep down where it counts, he really knows what he's doing...
...Just as we and the zoologist had a terrible fright when a half-eaten body bobbed up in a boat wreck in Jaws, so in laws 1I do we and Brody have a similar experience...
...It's hard to say which is the more severe sightwBruce on the attack, or Roy in repose...
...He also eats two scuba divers, one water skier, a can of gasoline (]lamb~), a whole smorgasbord of pleasure boats, and the Transatlantic Cable, which he fatally mistakes for some dental floss...
...The locals and the shark experts laugh at this idea, but subsequent events seem to imply that sharks are indeed an international brotherhood, like the Mafia, and do operate under the code of the vendetta as Brody guessed...
...Being as big a star as Norma Shearer was, Bruce also has one photogenic and one unphotogenic side, and his contract specifies, as hers did, that he can't be photographed from certain angles...
...Actually, we had a hint of Bruce's gangland connections in the first film, where the last shot of him showed him chewing on a diver's air tank as if it were a cigar and he were Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar...
...For the new film the original Bruce, who was found living like a vagrant in the park on Universal's back lot, has received a $2,000,000 refurbishing...
...Brody suggests early in the film that a new shark may be in Amity's waters looking for him because he killed the first one there...
...Finally, he has been outfitted with two new sets of teeth--one hard plastic set for eating boats, water skis, helicopters and the like, the other soft plastic for eating actors...
...Carnal knowledge...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 15
