best film: Jaws is the pretty easy winner here but Shaw is in, and is excellent in, one of the best Bond movies (From Russia With Love) and two best picture winners (The Sting, A Man For All Seasons). Jaws though is what he’s best known for and rightly so. The second half of Spielberg’s masterpiece is largely the Robert Shaw show. Jaws is a film that continues to grow on me over the years (about a decade ago I wouldn’t have called this one of Spielberg’s five best—which now seems ridiculous) and it’s a film that flirts with being in my top 100—a masterpiece.
best performance: Jaws and the USS Indianapolis monologue. It’s a brilliant character and Shaw is up to the challenge. He begins with the nails on the chalkboard (hell of an intro), gets to make speeches, gets to be funny, demanding, monomaniacal—you name it. But, it’s that monologue that often gets pointed to by critics as an exemplary piece of film acting.
stylistic innovations/traits: He’s superb in everything he did from 1963 to 1978 when he died, far too young, at age 51. Shaw is a character actor (Black Sunday below in his archiveable films is his only true lead and it’s not in his top 5 performances) who chewed the scenery and stole scenes from stars (poor Robert Redford gets bowled over by him in The Sting and Sean Connery finds himself on the losing end with Shaw twice—in both From Russia With Love and Robin and Marian).
directors worked with: Spielberg once in Jaws is the only big auteur though he worked with competent directors like Richard Lester, George Roy Hill, John Frankenheimer and Fred Zinneman all through his peak stretch.
Top 5 Performances:
- Jaws
- The Sting
- A Man For All Seasons
- From Russia With Love
- Robin and Marion
Archiveable films
| 1951- The Lavender Hill Mob |
| 1963- From Russia With Love |
| 1966- A Man For All Seasons |
| 1973- The Sting |
| 1974- The Taking of Pelham- One, Two, Three |
| 1975- Jaws |
| 1976- Robin and Marion |
| 1977- Black Sunday |
The Indianapolis monologue scene really is king, but you shouldn’t leave out Quint’s death scene either. I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as powerful with a lesser actor (or director, for that matter). There’s a lot of physicality present in this performance, you can see every movement from his foot to his face (and there’s quite a bit of facial acting in this scene) that he is struggling for his life and the screams are haunting. The scene doesn’t last for all that long and yet Shaw (as well as Spielberg, of course) milk it for all it’s worth and more.