Under the Spotlight: Quint, the biscuit-chomping Captain Ahab from ‘Jaws’
When British actor Robert Shaw was offered the part of salty shark hunter Quint in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster-defining Jaws, he initially didn’t want it. He’d read the Peter Benchley book it was based on and wasn’t a fan. But on the urging of his wife – Scottish actor Mary Ure – he decided to take the role that Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden had already passed on.
Unbeknownst to Shaw, it would be a star-making turn, rocketing him into Hollywood notability for the few years he had left before his death by heart attack in 1978. It was a performance that not only gilded his star but also lent depth and magnetism to the film itself, which surely helped the Spielberg train leave the station.
Shaw enters the film in a singular fashion, dragging his fingernails down the chalkboard in the back of a town meeting and jarring an entire crowd into shocked silence. Not only that, he manages to keep their silence and rapt attention as he takes his time laying his offer out on the table – this is Amity Island at the beginning of the lucrative summer season, and there’s a “bad fish” out there chasing away potential customers.
“You all know me, you know how I earn a living,” Shaw’s Quint says to the gathered townsfolk in his first lines of the film. “I’ll catch this bird for ya. But it ain’t gonna be easy.”
The biscuit-chomping, steely-eyed Quint lays down the facts about the shark the business owners had been so keen to downplay in a fashion that echoed years later in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park when palaeontologist Alan Grant puts the fear in a random snot-nosed kid about the brutality of velociraptors.
“This shark’ll swallow you whole,” Quint says. “Shakin’, tenderisin’, down you go.” It’s hard to believe Sam Neill didn’t think of this scene while delivering his own iconic monologue in the later film.
Jaws treats Quint’s entrance into the film as almost demonic. He lays down his offer of $10,000 for “the head, the tail, the whole damn thing” and the chance to bring back the tourists and save the local business community from a hard summer. But to do so, the people of Amity Island will have to consort with the likes of Quint – a modern Captain Ahab just one missed line from proclaiming, “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee”. He’s as spooky as the shark if the stunned silence of the room is anything to go by as he finishes his pitch.
After another attack, the townsfolk agree to enter Quint’s Faustian pact and send their own golem out to do the dirty work of harpooning and stringing up the local leviathan. And so we see Quint in his element, out behind the wheel of his not-big-enough boat, the Orca.
Quint’s saltwater swagger and bravado represent a kind of old-style masculinity the film bounces off fresh-out-of-the-city police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) and marine scientist Matthew Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). Soon, Quint and the latter are comparing scars and war stories.
There’s a real sense of humour to Quint here, though. While in many ways he’s a menacing and unscrupulous character, he’s no villain. His obsession with hunting down the shark himself, pushing him far enough to smash the radio and endanger his crew mates’ lives, may put him in that category, but at the point in the film where he and Hooper are sharing a drink, Spielberg actually makes you like him.
There’s a moment where Hooper shows him an old injury from a shark on his leg, and you can see in Quint’s body language that he’s finally seeing the college boy as a kindred spirit. His laugh and the congenial hand he puts on Dreyfuss’ leg mark a moment where he’s legitimately affable, despite all his caterwauling and bluster: “OK, so we drink to our legs!”
It’s a testament to Shaw’s immense talent that he was able to find so many facets to Quint – the asshole, the saviour, the madman.
Shaw based his performance on two local fishermen on Martha’s Vineyard, where a production notoriously beset by technical issues took place. One of those fisherman also played Ben Gardner in the film – he who floats up out of the shipwreck, creating a jump-scare for the ages.
And behind the Quint we see on screen is a bit of a backstory, and a suggestion of a life lived on the margins of his coastal community, haunted by memories that could have formed the basis of their own monster movie. It’s all laid out in the famous USS Indianapolis monologue, where Quint tells the true story of a World War Two-era ship spilling soldiers into shark-infested waters.
The scene, which is a mostly unbroken close-up of Quint’s face, is as horrific as any animatronic jump-scare or bloodbath Spielberg had planned for the film’s closing scenes. Shaw’s past as a stage actor comes into the fore here, as he captivates with a soliloquy with nothing but the power of his voice and wild-eyed glare: “Sometimes the shark go away, sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes, that shark, he looks right into you, right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at you, he doesn’t seem to be living. Until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over all white, then you hear that terrible high-pitched screaming. The ocean turns red.”
Shaw wasn’t just a stage actor but a playwright and a novelist. It’s disputed to this day how much of a hand he had in writing that monologue, but Carl Gottlieb – one of the scriptwriters brought in to punch up the movie – gives him primary credit.
Quint, the shark hunter, has gone down as one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, and most of the reason is the man behind playing him. Watching Robert Shaw cough up blood and slide down the Orca’s deck into the leviathan’s mouth again, it becomes apparent why Robert Duvall wasn’t in this movie. He was apparently offered the role of Chief Brody but refused to be in the picture unless he could be Quint – and doesn’t that make a whole lot of sense?
