The masterpiece that inspired the homonymous cult film is again in the bookstore. A journey into fears and human psyche. Because the real belves, in the end, is us.
Fifty years later, the morale remains the same: we are the shark. The ferocious beast with the teeth that pierce nestled in the dark depths is nothing else than the man. Indeed man is worse than the belves, because he does not act by instinct but for cruelty and shattering. This is demonstrated by the fact that the brutal and frightening shark of Steven Spielberg’s film released in 1975 is precisely a film monster, something exceptional and in some way supernatural. In reality it could not exist, and in fact nothing similar has ever been seen on earth. But the cinematographic audience of that time considered him very credible, to judge queues outside theaters. And it was not even difficult to witness panic scenes on the beach evidently fueled by the success of the feature film (twenty years ago Spielberg apologized for having made the reputation of marine predators).
The film was actually a deadly response: 470 million dollars collected globally, a more viewed film also in Italy in the 1975/1976 season. Even today, the shark is a classicone Which never betrays in the late evening on generalist TV: it is re -proposed frequently and every time it arouses chills. Less luck had the novel by the American writer Peter Benchley (1940-2006) from which the film is taken. Jaws (this is the original title translatable with “Fauci”) was to tell the truth a volume of enormous success, but most have forgotten it in fact. Probably, there are entire generations who know the film but who have never opened the novel. They will be able to do it now that in Italian bookstores a new edition of Lo Squalo created by Salani warehouses arrives and containing an interesting comments.
It is a welcome return to the shelves since the book is much better than one might think. We dispel any doubt: Here we are not talking about the Serie B narrative at all or of action package to be browsed to turn off the brain. Benchley was not Balzac, but he knew his own. When he began to conceive history he worked like Ghost Writer for the President of the United States Lyndon Johnson, not exactly something. But the political adventure was destined to end and for the author of speeches it served a new use useful to feed the offspring. Peter, while dedicating himself to Johnson’s boring boring he had developed some ideas for novels in the hope of building a future in the spotlight.
Perspective on which his wife Wendy appeared all in all skeptical. It is she, in one of the texts contained in the new edition, to tell something more about her husband’s literary attempts. «One spoke of modern pirates hunting in the Caribbean, the other of a shark that terrified a seaside community in the summer. When Johnson decided not to recover in the White House, Peter, who remained without work, tried to try his hand as a free spear in writing for a couple of years. Unfortunately he did not earn enough to be able to support our family. Desperate, he presented the stories of the shark and pirates to his agent, Roberta Pryor, in the hope that at least one of the two could work. Personally, I did not see just as one of those plots could take hold. But, fortunately, Peter was persevering and found an agreement with his publisher, who believed that the book on fish had potential “.
Well, the “Book on fish” worked all right, so much so that then at Benchley it would have been requested to produce other similar stories about terror in the seas (he wrote various, but not too successful). At the time of the exit of Lo Shark it seemed that the criticism was not so hostile, on the contrary. But later, when the book began to climb the rankings, the reviewers fierce, especially those of the most chic magazines. Since the volume also divided the space of the literary bestsellers, remaining there for over 40 weeks (translated: millions of copies sold), it was necessary to look at it with a certain arrogance, to call it trivial and boring. Despite the sake, however, the audience continued to welcome and it was there that someone came to make a film of it. At first he was not chosen as director Spielberg, then twenty -ninth century, but a more reliable colleague of his who, however, managed to unhook benchley continuing to confuse the shark with a whale. In the end, the project was entrusted to Bandalizoso Steven, from which the producers probably did not expect great results. And instead …
Carl Gottlieb, the screenwriter chosen for the project, told Film.it years ago that the expectations were not much: «At that time, while we shot the shark, everyone tried simply to do the best he could, we would never have thought that he would become the social phenomenon that was then. Nobody can explain it, but for some reason the film touched a sensitive point in the public. But it became a success only after the third – fourth week. The shark was a bit of a bet because it came out in 400-500 copies, which almost unprecedented, made by very few films before that moment; And then it was released during the summer, what this unusual, the summer was not the classic period in which to launch great films in theaters, people prefer to go to the beach. It was a marketing choice of the studios to make an release of the genre and after 3-4 weeks, when we expected people to stop going to the cinema, in reality he continued to go and see the film: there were people who returned to the cinema two, three, five times, still and again. An unprecedented fact. Soon that became a distribution model for many majors and changed the situation forever, positive and negative ».
Success in the bookstore, success in the cinema. With so much envy and misunderstanding in addition. One of the few to understand what the shark really was was Michael Rogers of Rolling Stone magazine. Commenting on the novel, he wrote that “none of the humans is particularly nice or interesting”, and the point is right here. The story is quite simple: a large and ferocious shark is fierce on the inhabitants of the radiant island of Amity, perhaps because of a curse. It is not any shark but a frightening and ravenous creature. Worse than him behave only men.
On the screen there are Roy Scheider (the police chief Martin Brody) Richard Dreyfuss (the oceanographer Matt Hooper), Robert Shaw (the fifth hunter of Sharks) Murray Hamilton (the mayor of Amity) and Lorraine Gary (Ellen, Brody’s wife). They are all petty beings, after all, small in the film and even worse in the book, which has some more plot lines. After a first mortal attack, the mayor – linked to organized crime – does not want the presence of a killer predator to be made known in order not to damage tourism takings. A nice guy, the first citizen, but not the most squalid. The oceanographer Hooper and Brody’s wife have a clandestine history and Tristanzuola, the shark hunter seems almost to have fun for the beautiful adventure he happens to face. Brody, for its part, is not a model of virtue, at least at the beginning. All the characters are moved by unconfessable interests or by personal ambitions, they put themselves in front of the life of the unsuspecting bathers, are corrupt or corruptible.
Fidel Castro, appreciating the film, said he staged the brutality of deadly capitalism. He exaggerated in ideology: the shark does not make political or economic criticism, instead he shows the dark side of men, their immense fragility, their terror that to explode does not need the – albeit splendid – soundtrack of the master John Williams. Life, reveals Benchley’s work, is basically a ruthless struggle for survival in a tumultuous sea of uncertainty in which friends are few and honest individuals even less. The shark is lurking among the waves, with open jaws. But the most feared fairs are around us, with the teeth discovered by a smile.
