Five movies that prove Roy Scheider was cinema’s most underrated actor
If someone asks you to picture Roy Scheider in a movie, your mind is going to go straight to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic Jaws.
It will either be the famous dolly shot where Spielberg zooms right in on his lead actor’s face as Chief Brody when he realises, to his horror, that the giant shark is busy attacking people on his beach, or it will be the moment he is half-in and half-out of the water, holding a rifle, having blown the oxygen canister-munching fish to bits.
And that’s completely understandable, because Jaws is one of the finest films ever made, and Scheider is absolutely superb in it, and honestly should have been Oscar-nominated, but the truth is, he had already established himself over the previous decade as not just one of the best supporting actors around, but a capable lead too.
There’s an argument that if you like thrillers, then New Hollywood represented the absolute peak, and Scheider was at the forefront of that movement alongside Pacino, Hackman and De Niro, making gritty, believable, life-on-the-streets movies set in crime-ridden US cities packed with characters you wouldn’t want to run into, let alone do a shady deal with.
But Scheider had far more in his locker than just police procedurals; the former boxer and US Air Force lieutenant would go on to have a 40-year career across genres, including a late highlight in the Spielberg-produced ‘Star Trek underwater’ TV series Seaquest DSV, so if all you know of the underrated man is Jaws, check out some of the other fantastic movies he played a huge part in.
Five brilliant Roy Scheider performances:
‘Klute’ (Alan J Pakula, 1971)
Alan J Pakula’s first foray into the world of paranoia, which he would go on to perfect with the Warren Beatty-starring The Parallax View and the peerless All the President’s Men, was this taut thriller starring Jane Fonda as a call girl whose every move is monitored by Donald Sutherland. While Fonda picked up an Oscar for ‘Best Actress’, her former pimp is played superbly by Scheider in a terrifically sleazy outing.
Although he had been in several movies by this point, including 1969’s Britt Ekland crime thriller Stiletto, this was the first movie with a style that would become synonymous with the New Jersey native: dark in tone, a script packed with twists, and the use of handheld camera techniques to ramp up the tension.
‘The French Connection’ (William Friedkin, 1971)
About as good as thrillers get, Scheider was Oscar-nominated for his role as Popeye Doyle’s partner Buddy Russo, his chemistry with the film’s lead Gene Hackman making for one of the finest films of the 1970s, complete with cars chasing trains, international drug deals, wiretaps, shootouts, and so much more. Throughout, a measured Scheider is the calming presence to Hackman’s barely containable rage.
Both men’s characters were based on real-life detectives, and they would shadow them on duty for weeks on end in order to gain vital insight and authenticity; Scheider’s Buddy Russo proved so effective that he played essentially the same character in his next movie, coming up below.
‘The Seven-Ups’ (Philip D’Antoni, 1973)
Philip D’Antoni, who produced The French Connection, handed Scheider his own corrupt cop drama two years later with The Seven-Ups, as he led a gang of New York police officers who employ dirty tricks to put criminals away for at least seven years. His first starring role proper, it proved he had the screen presence to lead a major movie.
The links to the far better known French Connection are plentiful, as not only were many of the same crew used, the same composer wrote the score, the film also features another fantastic car chase, with Scheider flying through Manhattan in a Pontiac, for which the producers neglected to get permission to film beforehand, because they knew it would be flatly turned down.
‘Sorcerer’ (William Friedkin, 1977)
Proving that directors who worked with him once tended to come back to him again, William Friedkin cast Scheider in this action-packed remake of 1953’s The Wages of Fear, often cited as one of the best films ever made. In the modern update, he leads a gang of four misfits trying to transport deadly nitroglycerin across South America in a dilapidated truck. The scene with Scheider and the vehicle on a rapidly disintegrating rope bridge in a torrential storm is genuinely jaw-dropping.
The ever outspoken Friedkin wasn’t kind about his leading man in the movie, stating openly that he originally wanted Steve McQueen or Jack Nicholson and saying that his decision to hire Scheider was the worst casting decision he ever made, as he “wasn’t a star”.
‘All That Jazz’ (Bob Fosse, 1979)
A truly incredible film, this is Scheider four years after Jaws in a role that couldn’t be much more removed from his shark hunting days, as he plays a womanising, drug-taking, chain-smoking, egomaniac artistic director trying to put on a Broadway show and make a movie at the same time as his mind and body begin to fail him.
A head-spinning, semi-biographical work of utter genius from Fosse, Scheider puts his absolute all into the film and was deservedly handed an Oscar nomination for a second time for a performance that outdoes even Jaws as a career-high. Stanley Kubrick declared it “the best film I think I have ever seen”, which is about as high as praise gets.
