This movie has everything, 3 great top billing actors, outstanding dialogue, adventure on the high seas, and frightening scenes that changed people's behavior. Plus, this is the movie that invented the word "Blockbuster", at least as it applies to movies.
I can't think of a more seminal 70's movie, can you?
best in terms of importance? maybe, but i'd say star wars takes that cake. best in terms of cinematic quality? it's definitely top 25 but not #1.
shareProbably right (and whilst it had sequels, it didn't need them)
Although i love 'JAWS 2' also
I give it a tie: The Godfather(1972) and Jaws(1975.)
I was there for both of them. Waited in long lines to see them. They had impact but I think -- versus other "obvious suspects" -- Star Wars, The Exorcist, Alien -- they had a certain "human connection" in the stories. They were violent, but not too violent -- extremely well written, extremely well acted.
The characters in Star Wars weren't quite as "deep and involving," the script of The Exorcist lacked humor and great lines (which Jaws and especially The Godfather have in abundance); Alien is a classic, but didn't really connect as much as The Godfather and Jaws did (too gory, perhaps -- too hard to "hear" the characters talk.)
My favorite movie each year in the 70s:
1970: MASH The Movie
1971: Dirty Harry (competitive candidate)
1972: The Godfather
1973: American Graffiti (second place Charley Varrick, Third Place The Sting.)
1974: Chinatown
1975: Jaws (much bigger hit than Chinatown)
1976 The Shootist(John Wayne's final film by the director of Dirty Harry)
1977: Black Sunday(an old-time thriller versus Star Wars and Close Encounters that year)
1978 National Lampoon's Animal House(HUGE hit, very smart comedy script)
1979 North Dallas Forty (NFL expose; Alien honorable mention.)
I'd put "Jaws" ahead of anything "Godfather", but that's just me. I identify with the regular folks of "Jaws", and not with the clannish professional criminals of the "Godfather" story.
For me, I'd put "Star Wars" and "Jaws" at the top of the top ten, which probably tells the rest of you everything you need to know about my taste level. Well, I like light entertainment, screw the gritty dramas!
That's why there's 31 flavors!
You can see that my own list is a bit esoteric...with some "usual suspects" (Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Chinatown, Jaws) mixed in -- near the end of the decade, I notice -- with some personal favorites that weren't particularly hits (The Shootist, Black Sunday, North Dallas Forty).
But...I called 'em as I saw them WHEN I saw them, and certain of them have grown over the years. It took quite a few viewings for me to learn all the great lines, all the great scenes, in The Godfather (I only; I have serious reservations about the slower, more arty II.)
How great that The Shootist was John Wayne's final film. Had THAT one not come along(and Wayne got the role after folks like Paul Newman and Gene Hackman passed), Wayne's final movies would have been Brannigan and Rooster Cogburn. Not good. The Shootist was at once very sentimental(Wayne's character is dying, WAYNE is dying) and tough(the great script, Don Siegel's Dirty Harry reputation.) Plus some final bows for James Stewart, Richard Boone and John Carradine, too. (They all did more movies, but not as good as that one.)
I linger on The Shootist because so much else that was great in the 70's was BIG at the box office: The Godfather, The Sting, The Exorcist, The Towering Inferno, Jaws, Star Wars, Grease...Alien wasn't actually (too gory; not enough SciFi fans for it?). The Shootist just snuck in and stole my heart...
Plus some final bows for James Stewart
I remember back in the day watching the disaster flick "Airport 77," the one where the plane crash landed in the ocean. It flew by me at the time, but at the end a craggy Jimmy Stewart appears in the inconsequential role of some Navy commander who greets the survivors. Around the same time we saw Eli Wallach as Robert Shaw's lackey in "The Deep." The Italian-produced turd "Tentacles" featured American luminaries Henry Fonda and John Huston, astonishingly enough. It seems like late 70s aquatic nightmare films were a refuge for the icons of old. If you want to stretch this a little further into the alien terror genre, the relatively watchable "Without Warning" starred a slew of once well-known old timers: Martin Landau, Jack Palance, Larry Storch, and the star of the outrageous hypernoir "Kiss Me Deadly," Ralph Meeker, who appeared for three minutes as a mumbling barfly. A few years later, slightly less iconic names would make cameos in early 80s skin flicks. An interesting time for faded stars seeking a last paycheck. I wonder if they even knew what sort of film they were appearing in.
very good list, I remember when I was 13 I walked 2 miles to sneak in and see Animal House. The next year when I was 14 I snuck in to see North Dallas Forty. I enjoyed them both.
shareI rate North Dallas Forty as the greatest sports film of all time. From one moment to the next it's either hilarious or intensely serious in a very substantive way. I always found it a pity that Mac Davis followed this up with an execrable stinker, "Cheaper to Keep Her," which effectively terminated his future as a comedic actor.
shareGreat list. I love that you picked Charley Varrick as no. 2 for 1973. Such an underrated movie! But for '77 I would have to substitute Close Encounters for Black Sunday. I don't like Black Sunday at all. The ending was so stupid and illogical that it ruined the whole movie for me.
shareGreat list. I love that you picked Charley Varrick as no. 2 for 1973. Such an underrated movie!
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It was a very "small" crime thriller, with the unlikely lead of hangdog middle-aged Walter Matthau as the criminal lead.
But Matthau's casting was key. He's a bank robber and he's willing to kill people but he's also not much of a macho man. And the Mafia sends a big muscular Texas goon(Joe Don Baker) to find him and kill him. Thus, the movie is 'brains versus brawn": Matthau has to THINK his way out of certain death. He spends a lot of the movie just chewing gum and THINKING. About his next move. One thing he does is to point the big killer Baker at OTHER enemies...Baker does the killing FOR Matthau of people who are dangerous to him. But it all pays off perfectly at the end.
Came the 80's, movies like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard were big and expensive and more like Star Wars than the smallish Charley Varrick. But Charley has his own modest 1973 style.
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But for '77 I would have to substitute Close Encounters for Black Sunday. I don't like Black Sunday at all. The ending was so stupid and illogical that it ruined the whole movie for me.
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Fair enough. I liked Black Sunday because it was a big, expensive, thriller which mixed a fair amount of Hitchcock plotting and structure with a "modern" look at something very scary: what if the insane terrorism of the Middle East reached a major American city with a terrorist bloodbath on American soil? A dark fantasy in 1977; reality in 2001.
Black Sunday was from a novel by Thomas Harris who would eventually write Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. Its his only book that was NOT about Hannibal Lecter.
A co-writer on Black Sunday was Ernest Lehman, who had written the great North by Northwest for Hitchcock and the not so great Family Plot for Hitchocck -- his final film, just one year before in 1976. Starring Bruce Dern.
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Speaking of Bruce Dern, he'd been the offbeat hero in the rather cheapjack Family Plot, but he agreed to be a villain(again) in the very expensive Black Sunday and he's great in the role. He looks great, he runs great and he's certainly a psycho(an ex Viet Nam POW, a bit of a cliché then) but a very sad one.
Robert Shaw from Jaws is a fine, conflicted hero. "New discovery" Marthe Keller, coming off of the thriller Marathon Man for producer Robert Evans(producer of Black Sunday) is beautiful and ruthless as the head terrorist.
It is all so exciting right up until the moment where the trailer ends: the blimp actualy crashing down into the Super Bowl. I loved it all the way to that point -- but yes, I had to just sort of shake my head at how haphazard the actual "disaster" is filmed. The bomb doesn't go off in the stadium so you get random footage of people running randomly as it is towed away to explode.
The cross-cutting between Shaw trying to get the grappling hook onto the blimp while a dying Dern tries to light the bomb fuse -- and succeeds -- reminds me of the sequence in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train where Farley Granger trying to win a tennis match is cross-cut with Robert Walker trying to grab an incriminating cigarette lighter from where he dropped it down a drain.
And John (Jaws) Williams score is -- what else? -- very exciting -- especially in the instant that the blimp falls into the Super Bowl.
Anyway, that's why I liked Black Sunday and why I put it above Star Wars and Close Encounters for 1977. I like a thriller.
But that's just me.
"Anyway, that's why I liked Black Sunday and why I put it above Star Wars and Close Encounters for 1977. I like a thriller. But that's just me."
I can't resist chiming in with my pick for 1977: "Sorcerer." I have a weakness for great films that ruined the careers of rising star directors (cf. John Carpenter's "The Thing"). Hell, by this time Friedkin was already a star. I suppose he would've been forgiven for "Sorcerer" were it not for his controversial and mediocre follow-up, "Cruising." The guy had guts, to be sure.
I acknowledge most of the pluses of this film. But for me it didn't achieve that type of greatness.
For one thing some of the events in the ending were kind of nuts (throwing a compressed air tank in the shark's mouth?)
Quint had to die but couldn't it have been another way? Like without the shark practically crawling up the deck of his boat.
Yes. It is the best movie of the 1970's.
sharevery good list, I remember when I was 13 I walked 2 miles to sneak in and see Animal House. The next year when I was 14 I snuck in to see North Dallas Forty. I enjoyed them both.
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With the coming of the "R" and "X" rating in 1968, the pre-teens and teenagers of the 70's ended up as "the first wave" of a group of "kids" who would make "the seeing of an R rated movie" (if not an X)...an adventure.
In my case, it was sneaking into one theater from another. Or, drive-ins were much more lenient back then...we just got a group and drove in.
I saw some R-rated movies with my father -- he was the "designated chaperone" for R rated material. I always joked that when I saw an R rated movie with my father(say, with a sex scene) NEITHER of us got to enjoy it. He would have enjoyed it if I wasn't there, I would have enjoyed it if HE wasn't there.
I didn't have to sneak in for Animal House and North Dallas Forty. But maybe they would have seemed better if I had HAD to.
And...you WALKED two miles to sneak in to Animal House? That's dedication!
I acknowledge most of the pluses of this film. But for me it didn't achieve that type of greatness.
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Part of the greatness of Jaws was how everyone saw it as one of a very small club of "superthrillers" that had come to the movies starting in 1960.
Psycho had been the superthriller in 1960.
The Exorcist had been the superthriller in 1973.
And Jaws was the superthriller of 1975.
By "superthriller," I mean a few things:
ONE: Financial blockbuster.
TWO: Seen all over the world by crowds "lined up around the block."
THREE: Talked about in EVERY home.
FOUR: Providing wall-to-wall, unforgettable thrills...and SCREAMS.
Interesting to me: When I saw Jaws(opening day) there were a LOT of screams during all the killings and in the "head pops out of the boat" scene. When I saw Psycho(full house revival) there were a LOT of screams during the killings(fewer killings than in Jaws) and for the climax.
When I saw The Exorcist -- after waiting in line for two hours -- there were NO screams. I think that's because Psycho and Jaws were about "monsters that creep up and jump out and kill you horribly" whereas Regan in The Exorcist really isn't a slasher type. No big knife. No big TEETH. She doesn't jump out and kill anybody. She's just real creepy. The audience went "ugh" a lot...but didn't scream.
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For one thing some of the events in the ending were kind of nuts (throwing a compressed air tank in the shark's mouth?)
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Jaws author Peter Benchley hated that ending (the shark just collapsed and drowned under harpoons and ropes in the book), but Spielberg knew what he was doing. The music...both in the build up and playout -- helped immensely. The shark goes BOOM! and Scheider is saved in the nick of time and everybody cheers and applauds. Interesting: the final moments and explosion of the Death Star two years later at the climax of Star Wars is almost EXACTLY THE SAME SCENE..with the same musical composer.
I suppose you could say the climax of Jaws was the first moment of "making the unbelievable believable" for effect. We hear something that sounds like an explosion where there really couldn't be one. It was for FUN.
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Quint had to die but couldn't it have been another way? Like without the shark practically crawling up the deck of his boat.
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In the book, Quint manages to get the harpoon into the shark but gets entangled in the ropes and is pulled down under the waves with the drowning shark...they die together, which is "fitting," but not really a MOVIE scene.
I think Quint's death is powerful in the movie. The shark does't crawl up the boat so much as positions itself to "receive" Quint as the boat sinks, on an angle dictated by the weight of the shark. Works for me.
And FINALLY, after any number of scenes where we couldn't really SEE how the shark ate somebody...we saw it in all its glory with the "most major star" among the victims. Its the goriest death in Jaws, and we ALL contemplate "what a horrible way to die!"
Indeed, the sheer brutality of how the shark eats Quint makes the sharks's subsequent killing before it can eat Brody all the more satisfying.
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The 70's sure did have a lot of "event blockbusters": The Godfather. The Exorcist. The Sting. The Towering Inferno. Jaws. Star Wars. Grease. Alien. Picking "the best" from that bunch is pretty hard to do.
But I think you can throw some of those out right away and narrow it down to the ones that were entertaining AND great films. The Godfather and Jaws were intelligent and entertaining.
Alien wasn't really at the blockbuster gross of Jaws and The Exorcist. So its out.
Grease was kind of silly. So its out.
The Towering Inferno had a great cast -- the biggest stars ever in some ways -- but it was a disaster movie. So its out.
The Exorcist was powerful -- but then AND now, it was laughed at for some of its vomitous effects and disdained for what amounted to on-screen child abuse. And its simply not as fun as Psycho or Jaws in the same type of film. So its out.
The Sting? HUGE blockbuster. Great, clever, intricate script. Newman and Redford gorgeous, manly and intelligent as a buddy team. But maybe not quite as profound as The Godfather or as exciting as Jaws. So its out.
Star Wars? If there is one movie that could beat The Godfather and Jaws for the seventies, this is it. It made the most money. It proved to be the most influential...it leads through decades of effects films to Marvel movies today( and it is STILL a franchise.)
And yet..for all the landmark effects and historic elements -- the movie AS a movie is a bit "childish" -- the dialogue and acting isn't quite top notch among the three leads, the story takes a long time to get going, and sort of meanders in the middle. Unlike The Godfather(with very profound and adult themes) and even the brutal monster movie Jaws, Star Wars was considered " a new type of Disney movie." So its out.
...or is it?
The thing about Star Wars is it's mostly for kids, flying in space with 70's haircuts lol.
Jaws had 3 great actors, playing adult characters that were totally believable. Plus, the shark really did scare the bejesus out of millions of movie goers. Plus we saw decapitated heads and missing limbs.
The thing about Star Wars is it's mostly for kids, flying in space with 70's haircuts lol.
Perhaps true, but Star Wars featured mainly mature, adult actors and had a lot of humor that, while not escaping kids altogether, is really on an adult level. These ingredients are sorely lacking in almost every film of this type today. Of course, Jaws is the textbook case of an immensely popular thriller that was elevated to the stratosphere by its trio of superbly written adult characters. I stress the word "adult" because they seem in awfully short supply these days, even in the recent blockbuster "Maverick." I liked it quite a bit, but Tom Cruise still seems like a sixty year old teenager.
I agree, in today's Hollywood the talent isn't allowed to rise to great heights. They can make the picture and sound perfect but the movie turns out completely soulless.
shareWhen I got my first driver's license, in 1970, all of the information was just typed on it with a typewriter. I was able to carefully erase the birth year, insert the card into a typewriter, and make myself old enough to get into R movies. It worked perfectly, no harm done.
shareGreat username! Loved that show.
shareJAWS is, quite simply, a great movie. It’s superior filmmaking from start to finish. The acting, cinematography, editing, sound, music, it’s all first class. I sometimes think Director Spielberg doesn’t get enough credit. Just look at his blocking and staging during the tiger shark scene. There’s a great shot with Brody and the Mayor talking in the background, while Hooper is talking in the foreground (about not wanting to get beaten up). It’s little things like that that make the movie so rich.
Considering the trouble with the shark, and, to a lesser extent, the problems getting the script completed, it’s a wonder that JAWS turned out the way it did. Everything just came together, and all the parts fit perfectly. With all that said, I’ll go on record and say JAWS is the best film of the 70s.
Star Wars (1977) would be close behind for me, but I would agree, & I would perhaps go one step further, for the reasons you stated, and many more, & say JAWS is perhaps the greatest movie of all time for me anyway, it's just a wonderful piece of entertainment!
The movie poster alone is just the 'quintessential' (pun intended) example of how to market a film, in such a simple yet terrifying way, and two chords, just two chords is all it took for John Williams to hook us all with his astonishing score.
x***
Yes
shareI have to go with Dracula vs Frankenstein in 1971
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