On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Only 316 out of 1,196 men survived the sinking and shark-infested waters.
Sincere kudos to those brave soldiers who did (and did not) make it out of the water.
I’ve already celebrated the great Robert Shaw’s effort to immortalize this moment in American history, which became one of the scenes in American cinema. It seems worth revisiting, below.
I don’t have much to add to that picture, above. Except that I saw it, at a bar at Martha’s Vineyard (quite appropriate, since as most folks know, Amity Island, where Jaws terrorized beach-goers in 1975, was of course filmed at and around the Vineyard), and I snapped a shot. It kind of makes you want to tip back a Narragansett. Almost. Naturally, you’d have to down it in one prodigious swig, as Quint did in the immortal moment captured, above. The bartender appreciated my appreciation and remarked that the vintage ad was so popular, the bar actually carried the beer for a while. Ultimately, it was considered so iredeemably awful that they stopped tormenting the customers. And by torment, they meant: when people (like me) saw that ad, and saw that they actually had Narragansett in the house, they had to try it. I know I would have.
More could (and should) be said about the great Robert Shaw, who is best known for being Quint, but had other high profile roles, like Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting, Mr. Blue in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the overlooked and woefully unappreciated Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin and Marian (along with Sean Connery; you think you can handle the truth?). It can suffice to say that he had a ton of great work in him when he collapsed at 51, the victim of a heart attack.
There are any number of scenes that one could single out to celebrate Shaw’s genius but we all know which one rises above the rest. The scene. It not only is the best scene in Jaws, it also manages to be the most horrifying one, and the infamous shark never appears. One of the best scenes ever? It’s on the short list. And it’s all Robert Shaw (who actually rewrote the original dialogue and came up with what we now celebrate).
