Robert Shaw was cooler than you will ever be. You may think you’re cool, driving around in your shiny new Audi, wearing $300 sunglasses and drinking a $9 soy latte, but you’re not cool. Fuck your latte. Robert Shaw drank his coffee boiling hot, straight from the pot. And he drank his coffee mixed with nine fingers of Macallan’s and a pint of liquid nicotine. Sometimes he even drank it with an ounce of blood, because fuck it, why not? Robert Shaw was the fucking man. And he died like a fucking man, on the side of the road from a massive coronary, his lungs the size of sun-beaten limes and his liver more spotted than English dairy cow. You’ll probably die in a hospital all sad and regretful. Psshhhh, Lame City, bro.
The ultimate villain when villains were still villains and not whining babies having a hard time dealing with issues they had during their adolescence, Shaw was not only routinely diabolical in his character portrayals, but uniquely diabolical with each performance. He didn't need to arch his eyebrows and laugh maniacally to get across the fact that he was a bad motherfucker - he stepped into the skin of the character, and instead of playing the character, he was the character. There was no hamming with Robert Shaw. Hamming is for dipshits like John Travolta (who did a piss poor job reprising Shaw's character in the piss poor remake of "Taking of Pelham..."). If zombie Robert Shaw came back from the dead and watched the "Pelham" remake, he would track down John Travolta, grab him by his stupid cult tunic, and rip out his esophagus for making a mockery of the character and tarnishing the movie's title forever.
In my own humble, nonabrasive opinion, Shaw's apex as "the bad guy" was done in Jaws. Yes, yes, I know, this is news to no one in the entire galaxy who hasn't been locked in a Siberian gulag for the last thirty-five years. But still, I like to state the obvious because I sometimes have a hard time transitioning between thoughts.
/doodles a picture of Cobra Commander
Anyway...Shaw aggressively steals every single scene he is in, and even though I think Roy Scheider's and Richard Dreyfuss's performances are somewhat underrated in this movie because of Shaw's prodigious portrayal of Quint, it still turns into the Robert Shaw show whenever he is on screen without much of a competition. Because Shaw actually blurs the lines between fiction and reality, making you believe that he actually went down with the USS Indianapolis and fought off shark attacks for 49 hours or however long the survivors were stuck in the water waiting for rescue. It's the perfect characterization; he's a shark hunter, he despises them, and he hunts sharks because they ate Herbie Robinson from Cleveland and a bunch of his other pals. There is no mutual respect or divine love or any of that hokey shit Hollywood nowadays infuses into its villains to humanize them. Quint wanted cash to kill sharks because he hated them. That is all.
/doodles a picture of Cobra Commander
Anyway...Shaw aggressively steals every single scene he is in, and even though I think Roy Scheider's and Richard Dreyfuss's performances are somewhat underrated in this movie because of Shaw's prodigious portrayal of Quint, it still turns into the Robert Shaw show whenever he is on screen without much of a competition. Because Shaw actually blurs the lines between fiction and reality, making you believe that he actually went down with the USS Indianapolis and fought off shark attacks for 49 hours or however long the survivors were stuck in the water waiting for rescue. It's the perfect characterization; he's a shark hunter, he despises them, and he hunts sharks because they ate Herbie Robinson from Cleveland and a bunch of his other pals. There is no mutual respect or divine love or any of that hokey shit Hollywood nowadays infuses into its villains to humanize them. Quint wanted cash to kill sharks because he hated them. That is all.
On top of being revered as an actor, Shaw was also a literary genius, penning a dozen novels, screenplays and plays, in between fathering ten children. Yes, TEN. I can barely keep track of my two nephews, so I can't imagine how much brain power it would take to send Christmas cards to ten different kids. Fuck it, I'd probably have a hard time remembering their names.
In the end, Shaw went out shockingly and abruptly, dying of a heart-attack in 1978 at the age of 51. And that sucks. Because he had at least another two decades left in him, and a dozen or so performances that would inspire me to get drunk and quote him at bars to people who don't give a shit. But you know what they say, "make one man happy, and you make them all happy." Okay, so maybe nobody ever says that, but they should, because there's only so many times I can yell "HOOPER DRIVES THE BOAT" before the bouncer uses my skull as a battering ram to open the front door of the bar.
Five Robert Shaw Movies You Should Watch:
1. Jaws
2. The Sting
3. A Man of All Seasons
4. From Russia with Love
5. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
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