Rod steiger jaws theme song
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DUCK, YOU SUCKER! “And I think John Williams, as he often does, takes a simple idea, a simple motif, and just expands it and develops it into basically a symphony.”
Williams went on to score more than 100 films, including other classic Spielberg collaborations such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jurassic Park,“ “Schindler’s List” and the “Indiana Jones” franchise,” but he never imagined that the repeated pattern of “Jaws” would never go away.
“At that time, I had no idea that it would have that kind of impact on people,” he told Classic FM.
And Spielberg has credited the “Jaws” theme as a major part of the movie’s success.
“When everyone came out and said ‘Jaws’ scared them out of the water, it was Johnny who scared them out of the water,” Spielberg said in the Blu-ray featurette.
THE LOVED ONE (1965)
Director: Tony Richardson. Writers: Christopher Isherwood, Terry Southern, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. Starring Robert Morse, Jonathan Winters, Liberace, Rod Steiger.
Steiger was known as one of the most macho of actors, so it was a bit of a surprise when he was cast in Tony Richardson’s funeral industry satire as the fey Mr.
Joyboy, the chief embalmer at Whispering Glades cemetery and mortuary. Mr. Joyboy loves children, particularly if they’re dead. Reportedly one of Steiger’s own favorite performances, his work in “The Loved One” is a hoot, sending up his macho image while at the same time staying true to this key character in the Evelyn Waugh satire.
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He had a great sense of humor, and I thought he was putting me on.”
But Williams was scaring up the menacing motif that would sink its teeth into moviegoers — and terrify beachgoers — for generations to come in the film classic that would launch his and Spielberg’s careers into historic heights.
While Spielberg might have first thought it was a joke, Williams was dead serious about the ominous ostinato of notes E and F played by tuba player Tommy Johnson.
“He said, ‘You can’t be serious?’” Williams — who had previously worked with Spielberg on 1974’s “The Sugarland Express” — told Classic FM in 2022 about his chilling riff to “represent our primordial fear.”
“I think in Spielberg’s mind … you want something really complicated and layered and, you know, atonal horror music or whatever,” film music historian Tim Greiving — who wrote the upcoming biography “John Williams: A Composer’s Life” — exclusively told The Post.
“But John Williams has such a great story instinct that he knew that the simpler, the better, that kind of economy and just, like, pure drive was what this movie needed.
2 — the “Jaws” theme is even bigger than movies.
“I think the two-note theme in ‘Jaws’ is maybe the most famous musical unit in the history of music. That’s the brilliance of it.”
However, Greiving notes that the two-note “Jaws” theme that that has struck fear across generations is just a small part of the score that won Williams the first of his four Oscars for Best Original Score.
“I talked to [Oscar-winning composer] Hans Zimmer for my book, and he just said, ‘You know, everyone’s scared of those two notes, but for composers, we’re scared of everything after those two notes, because the whole thing is so impressive,’” he said.
OKLAHOMA! It's a shame he wasn't able to dismiss Steiger's overacting either. They buy the house for $80,000 and so the film unfolds, slowly burning and building to its climax of exploding windows and walls and stairs that drip blood.
It certainly slowly turns the screws in the minds of the characters and the audience and builds pressure cooker-style, exploding like the front door off the house.
AL CAPONE (1959)
Director: Richard Wilson. Writers: Malvin Wald, Henry F. Greenberg. Starring Rod Steiger, Nehemiah Persoff, Fay Spain, James Gregory.
Using a gritty semi-documentary style of filmmaking, “Al Capone” is probably the most thorough screen biography of the legendary Chicago gangster, and a large part of its impact is thanks to Steiger’s tough performance as Capone. He portrays Capone as a man on a mission, business-like in his dealings with rivals until his temper explodes. Despite Capone’s at times flamboyant appearance, Steiger carefully modulates his performance for maximum impact. Until the late 1950s, the Production Code expressly forbade films that glamorized gangsters, and Steiger turned down this script three times until the producers took the glamour out and put the grit back in.
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Rod Steiger also has a memorable turn as Father Delaney, he perhaps has one of the most memorable scenes in the film blessing a room in the house only to interrupted by flies in winter (the films answer to The Omen’s er Doberman) and a hissing malevolent voice telling him to ‘get out!’
Even if it almost seems as if his character belongs more in The Omen at times.
I think you could argue that,” he said.
“I think more people around the world recognize these two notes played as the ‘Jaws’ theme more than almost any other piece of music.”
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“His music was scarier than seeing the shark.”But for Greiving — whose Williams biography will be released on Sept.
There is also a nice appearance from Murray Hamilton, probably best known as Amity’s Mayor Vaughn in Jaws.
Hamilton is only in The Amityville Horror for around three and a half minutes - he's still fifth billed in the credits as he is in Jaws - and it's a shame he doesn't have a larger role.
He's there to dismiss Rod Steiger's claim that the Lutz family are in danger in their house, essentially denying anything going on just like he did as Mayor Vaughn.
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967)
Director: Norman Jewison. Writer: Stirling Silliphant. Starring Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Beah Richards.
Steiger won the Best Actor Academy Award and Golden Globe for his performance as a small-town Mississippi sheriff in Norman Jewison’s murder mystery, which itself won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Chief Gillespie (Steiger) has a murder to investigate and arrests an African-American at the train station for the crime. That man, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) happens to be a top homicide detective from Philadelphia who has traveled to Sparta to lead the investigation of the crime. This doesn’t sit well with Gillespie, but with the two men being forced to work with one another, each acquires a grudging respect for the other. In what could have been a stereotypical redneck role, Steiger gradually reveals the humanity inside Gillespie, so that the men’s final nod to one another feels dramatically earned.
Inside the ‘Jaws’ theme song creation 50 years ago: ‘Everyone’s scared of those two notes’
They were the two notes of terror heard around the world.
They were the two notes of terror heard around the world.
But director Steven Spielberg initially laughed off composer John Williams’ “Jaws” theme that would become the signature sound — and sign — of the great white shark’s attack in the summer blockbuster that opened 50 years ago on June 20, 1975.
“I expected to hear something kind of weird and melodic, something tonal, but eerie; something of another world, almost like outer space under the water,” said Spielberg in a 2012 Blu-ray featurette on the making of “Jaws.”
“And what he played me instead, with two fingers on the lower keys, was ‘dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun.’ And at first, I began to laugh.
Although the family, clearly including children, aren’t named they are the very real DeFeo family, by eldest son, Ronald DeFeo, shot in their beds as they slept on November 13th 1974.
The Lutz’s (played by James Brolin and Margot Kidder) and their children look round the house a year later, shown round by the estate agent who just so happens to be the save the clocktower woman from Back To The Future, funnily enough Strickland from BTTF also plays a coroner in the previous scene.
As the couple are shown round the house it overlaps with scenes of the murders taking place in those rooms, which is really effective.
It adds a further dimension to the book and film, just don’t expect it to answer many questions. “And you had this musical signature, this musical brand to that phenomenon. It’s a nice and unique addition to the continuing story – true or otherwise.
Rod Steiger movies: 12 greatest films ranked worst to best
12.
ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)
Director: Elia Kazan. Writer: Budd Schulberg. Starring Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb.
Steiger broke into the moviegoing public’s consciousness with his powerful performance in Elia Kazan’s film, the Oscar winner for Best Picture of 1954. Steiger’s Charley Malloy is a key part of the film’s most iconic scene, one of the greatest in all of cinema, in which, in the back seat of a car, he listens to the frustrations of his boxer brother Terry (Marlon Brando), who had to take a fall during a fight on Charley’s orders that kept Terry from becoming a real contender. Watch Steiger during this scene — it’s clearly Brando’s show but watch Steiger listening and subtly reacting to his brother’s bitter disappointment. That is a prime example of subtle acting, one which brought Steiger his first Academy Award nomination.
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So far, so typical house of horror, but amid the lightning outside we see lightning inside, created by gunfire in each of the rooms. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965)
Director: David Lean. Writer: Robert Bolt, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak. Starring Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay.
David Lean’s epic film version of the Boris Pasternak novel was an enormous hit, certainly the biggest film with which Steiger had ever been associated. Marlon Brando and James Mason both turned down the role of Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, the well-connected man with whom 17 year-old Lara (Julie Christie) has an affair, but Steiger runs with the role and makes it his own. Though playing the film’s antagonist, Steiger never makes Komarovsky a cardboard villain, instead playing him as a man who has deep feelings for Lara, and even when she shoots and wounds him, he is not vindictive against her, declining to press charges. It’s the kind of solid character performances that Steiger regularly turned in during the 1950s and ’60s.