The Fiction of Captain Quint

Fifty years ago, the original summer blockbuster stoked terror from screens across a country where even the most devoted moviegoers barely knew the name Steven Spielberg. Faster than you can yell “Shark!”, Jaws propelled the 27-year-old director to fame even as it made people afraid to go into the water.

Like a lot of B-movies before and since its June 20, 1975, release, Jaws dared audiences to ask whether the monster or certain of the humans who strut across the screen are more grotesque. Think back to that opening scene on the beach. The drunk and stoned teens we watch are as horny as any who will fall prey to slashers in franchises to come. As for the kids who try to simulate a shark attack a bit later in the film, causing panic on a crowded beach and wasting resources needed to hunt for the real danger, the less said, the better. And the oily mayor who wants to keep the beaches open for the sake of tourist bucks, while staying out of peril himself, is hardly more endearing than the underseas predator that bites off limbs left and right, turning the turquoise waters red.

Of course not everyone here is outright repulsive. This is a story of the complexity of our species. After the shark itself, the most memorable character in Jaws is surely its antihero, Quint, the gruff and grizzled bounty hunter who commands the wary respect of a town desperate to end the bloody attacks.

Yet for all the film’s success, the British actor and author who played Quint stayed something of a cipher to many here in America. When people spotted Robert Shaw here and there in the media after the film’s release, some might have said, “Oh, there’s the guy from Jaws who gets eaten up at the climax!” It is unlikely that many recognized a prolific fiction writer and dramatist, or a man far more intellectual in real life than the characters in Jaws who disdain what Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) in one scene calls Quint’s “working-class bull—-.”

Like other self-destructive men of letters, Shaw could write with a conviction missing from the work of more sedate and established authors. His literate style recalls Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, W. Somerset Maugham, and, to my mind, Australia’s Nobel laureate, Patrick White. Had Shaw not drunk himself into an early grave at 51, a mere three years after the movie’s release, there is no telling what he might have gone on to do. As it stands, his output is substantial enough that it should prod the publishers of today to ask why they have let his oeuvre languish out of print for so many years.

According to an excellent Cinema Surgery documentary and other sources, Shaw was not Spielberg’s first or even second choice to play Quint, even if, half a century on, we could hardly imagine anyone else in the role. Admittedly, it would make little sense to assume any deliberate thematic continuity between the actor’s work before and after Spielberg cast him in Jaws

Yet in a way, Shaw’s vivid 1961 novel The Sun Doctor does seem to anticipate not only the themes of Jaws, but the essence of Quint. The book is an account of a British doctor, Benjamin Halliday, who makes his way home to London after a stint in Angola where he acted on philanthropic urges to the point of putting his life in danger many times out in the wild. With a view to making the world a better place and escaping his demons, Halliday went off to Angola. He hoped to help tribespeople avoid disease, conflict, and predators of the wild.

In a long flashback to his time there, the doctor befriends a tribal elder who goes by the name Friday. In one of the novel’s gripping passages, Halliday and Friday try to navigate a river full of crocodiles. When Friday ends up in the water, floundering and helpless, only the strength, speed, and resourcefulness of the doctor save the elder from becoming lunch. Nice to have Quint around when crocs surround you in a rushing river.

All well and good, the reader thinks, Bravo, Halliday, proto-Quint. But we soon see that the doctor acts on a messiah complex so severe that it verges on suicidal. In this world it is all too possible to be too saintly, as in a scene where a number of the tribesmen gather to hurl rocks at the doctor. His response is to tell them meekly that he loves them all before vanishing into a metal silo whose interior is too hot to bear. Maybe the symbolism here is a bit too broad.

A reader would have to be willfully obtuse to think that Halliday is in Angola just to try to help others. During The Sun Doctor’s London scenes, the tormented man comes across as uniquely ill-prepared to grapple with life in a modern city where others subject him to stilted standards of deportment. Cut the flowery talk: Benjamin Halliday is as bad a drunk as Robert Shaw himself. He admits to a kindly woman who plays host to him upon his return to London that he cannot respect a man whose drinking sessions do not end in four others carrying him off to bed. Drink is a way of life and death.

In this context, the sun doctor’s sojourn in the wilds of western Africa comes to look all the more like the kind of altruism that some people undertake for no better reason than to signal their virtue and convince themselves, as much as anyone, that they are, at bottom, decent and likable in spite of what you might deduce from the conduct you have witnessed. Scratch a do-gooder and you may well find someone with a burning need for a bit of perspective on his own shortcomings.

Indeed it is hard not to notice the parallels between Halliday, who tries to play missionary to tribes in Angola, and Quint, whose disdain for the soft and spoiled residents of the seaside community has a class edge but turns, ultimately, on a feeling that they lack the knowledge, resourcefulness, and grit to face what an erratic universe throws at them.

In the end, there is still another ingredient at play. More is going on in this novel than pie-in-the-sky do-gooderism. In scene after scene, the simple truth that the doctor needs danger stares the reader in the face. The same urge to experience existential risk that drives a man to drink with abandon for hours on end or to set off in pursuit of a giant shark in a rickety old boat propels Halliday’s misadventures in the bush. He finds there that kind of transcendence that Quint recalls in the most famous speech in the history of film.