Steven Spielberg is one of the most skilled and certainly the most influential filmmaker of the modern era. His ability to create memorable scenes and to squeeze every ounce of entertainment value out of even weak material has earned him the plaudits of audiences for the past three decades. Even his misses, such as Hook, Amistad, and his adaptation of War of the Worlds, are worth watching for what Spielberg is able to put on the screen. His best works are well judged to be classics of the cinematic art.

Jaws

There were surely big event movies before Jaws. 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Godfather come to mind. But in the summer of 1975, Jaws defined what would become the summer blockbuster ever since. Tens of millions of people would line up for hours for the privilege of being scared out of their wits by a great white shark.

The story is a conventional one, a monster movie about a shark that terrorizes a resort town of Amity Island. What causes the film to transcend its material is what Spielberg does with it. At first we don’t see the monster, but rather its first victim, a beautiful woman who takes a midnight swim. We see the horror and pain on her face as the shark attacks from below, a brief moment of seeming deliverance as she grabs the buoy, and then her final destruction as she is dragged down to be devoured alive.

The horror is steadily ratcheted up as more attacks occur during the town’s summer tourist season. While Police Chief Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, quickly realizes that the beach has become the feeding ground of a great white shark, the local business community remains, for a while, in denial.

Finally, the town is forced to hire the services of a shark hunter named Quint, played by the late Robert Shaw. Quint is the most interesting character of the movie (aside from the shark). He’s a gruff, old salt whose life was changed forever by the fact that he was a member of the crew of the World War II ship the Indianapolis. The Indianapolis, having delivered the atomic bombs that ended the war to Tinian Island, was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Most of the crew went into the water with life jackets and were picked off one by one by schools of sharks for several days until the wreck was discovered and the survivors rescued. Quint obviously has a grudge against sharks that matches Captain Ahab’s grudge against the great white whale, Moby Dick.

Quint, accompanied by Brody and Matt Hooper, a scientist and shark expert played by Richard Dreyfuss, set forth to find and kill the great white and the movie truly comes into it’s own. The duel between the three men on board the fragile fishing boat and the shark, with its scenes of claustrophobic suspense, provides some of the most riveting—and frightening—film entertainment ever put on the screen.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters tends to hold up more than Spielberg’s other alien movie of the era, ET. It has less of the sugary sweetness of the latter movie and far more suspense.

The film starts with a series of vignettes. An airliner is buzzed by a UFO. Several 1940s planes, missing since just after the Second World War, mysteriously appear again in the Mexican desert. A small boy is abducted by an unknown force practically before the shocked eyes of his mother, Jillian Guiler, played by Melinda Dillon. A utility repairman, Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, has a strange encounter with bright lights in the sky on a lonely, country road. Clearly something is up.

Neary starts to make strange structures in shaving cream and mashed potatoes. His wife and children soon conclude that he’s going crazy. Yet, the compulsion continues. Meanwhile, a secret government organization seems to be aware of the aliens and have divined, so they think, their intentions. One of the experts in the secret organization is a French scientist played by the great film director Francois Truffaut.

Meanwhile, a television newscast shows Neary the source of his obsession. The area around Devil’s Tower, a mountain in Wyoming, is being cordoned off by the government. The excuse is the accidental release of a toxic poison. But, we know that the real reason is that the aliens are going to land there. Neary, knowing now what he must do, sets forth.

He is not the only one being “called” by the unknown force, He meets Jillian Guiler, the mother whose son was taken, and—despite the well intentioned interference of the government organization, the two make it to the landing site, which has been festooned with all sorts of high tech equipment (by 1970s standards) in anticipation of the alien landing. What happens next, when the aliens do land, is awe inspiring.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Based on an idea by Spielberg’s good friend George Lucas (of Star Wars fame), Raiders of the Lost Ark is a fun thrill ride of a movie that doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is, which is an opportunity to spend two hours in the dark with a lot of other people enjoying oneself. The time in the 1930s and the hero is Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford with the look (deliberate I’m sure) of Humphrey Bogart with an unshaven face, leather jacket, and worn fedora. He’s an archeologist, but he seems to be more skilled with a gun and a whip than he is a pick and brush. Not that it matters. The Nazis are in Egypt and they are after the Ark of the Covenant, the mystic powers of which they intend to use for world conquest. That is, unless Indy gets to it first.

There’s a girl, of course, Marion Ravenwood, played with spunky panache by Karen Allen, and a side kick, Sallah, played by the great Welsh character actor John Rhys-Davies. And there are villains to burn, including Indy’s rival, a French archeologist Rene Balloq, played by Paul Freeman, as well as Ronald Lacey and Wolf Kahler as Nazi thugs.

The real fun of Raiders lay in the cliff hanger situations Indy and his friends keep finding themselves in. That is especially true of the truck chase toward the latter third of the movie in which Indy cheats death, by my count, a couple of dozen times. The film is full of fun little vignettes, like what Indy does when the Egyptian thug confronts him with a giant scimitar.

Don’t see this film for the logic or consistency. (For instance, since Egypt was run by the Brits at the time of the film, why didn’t they just boot the Nazis out of the country? Well, if they had, there would be no movie.) Watch it for the great fun you’ll have.

Schindler’s List

Schindler’s List is Spielberg’s best film to date and may be the best film of the latter half of the twentieth century. It tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a greedy, decadent German businessman who uses his connections in the Nazi Party to start a factory in Poland and staff it with Jewish slave laborers. Schindler has nothing for or against Jews personally. He merely sees them as a good way to make a quick buck.. The fact that the Jews he employs get to live a little while longer is just incidental.

Slowly, though, Schindler begins to change. First, influenced by his dignified, Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, but then just by being aware of the evils happening around him, Schindler becomes an unlikely hero. The tipping point is when Schindler witnessed the brutal destruction of the Krakow Ghetto. It would take a heart harder than Schindler’s not to be moved by that. From then on, he finds that he has a new purpose, which is to save as many Jews as possible.

The most awe inspiring scene in the history of cinema happens when Schindler learns that some of his Jews have been diverted to Auschwitz due to a bureaucratic error. Schindler strides into the camp, literally through the gates of a man made hell on Earth, and with a combination of fast talk and bluster, plucks his Jews literally from out of the gas chambers.

At the end of the war, it turned out that Schindler had saved about 1100 human beings from death, using the skills of chicanery and guile that had served him so well as a businessman and a bon vivant. He was not, by the most standards, a particularly good man. But when the war was over, he did weep for those he could not save. If only, he laments, he had been a bit cleverer, worked a bit harder, perhaps more might have lived. And so Spielberg shows us a portrait of a great man.

Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan starts with some of the most horrific and realistic battle footage ever put on the screen. For the first twenty or so minutes of the film, the viewer experiences the storming of Omaha Beach as much like someone who is there as it is possible without actually being there. As Captain Miller, a Ranger officer, played by Tom Hanks, fights desperately to survive and to get off the beach, we see death and fear and horror at every turn. At the end of that sequence, the viewer feels as exhausted and grateful as if he had been in the battle and survived.

It is after the Omaha Beach sequence when the real story begins. It seems that in the space of about two days, three brothers named Ryan have died in combat. A fourth brother, Private Ryan of the 101st Airborne Division, is all who is left. And he is somewhere behind the lines in Normandy. General Marshal, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, personally orders that the boy be found and brought home to be a comfort to his mother.

That task falls to Captain Miller and a squad of Rangers, played by, among others, T0om Sizemore as Miller’s Sergeant, and Vin Diesel. The squad embarks on a kind of odyssey through war torn France, all the time wondering why their lives are being put at risk to save just the life of one. Miller is a man who has seen too much, having fought all the way from the beginning in North Africa, and has counted the numbers of boys who have died under his command.

When they finally find Ryan, played by Matt Damon, they find him with survivors of the airborne unit he was in holding a village against an expected Nazi attack. He refuses to return with the Rangers to safety and home. “But your brothers are dead,” he is told. He looks around at his fellow paratroopers. “These are my brothers,” he replies.

Having stepped from the surreal to something beyond, Miller and his Rangers decide to stay themselves and to help fight off the German assault. What follows is an epic that is filled with heroism, cowardice, triumph, and fear. These are not cinematic, gung ho heroes who seem impervious to fear and human frailties. These are just ordinary men, most not much more than boys, who once upon a time were asked to save the world. Spielberg does them and us a service to show them as they truly were. It enhances rather than detracts from the glory of what they did and the horror of what they endured.