Monday, May 4, 2015

The Life And Times of Chief Martin Brody

Today is a bit of an odd one. I want to talk about the life of Chief Martin Brody from Jaws.

As a fan of film and television, I tend to follow the careers of actors that I like. In so doing, you typically see how the actor begins in roles that are poorly defined or strange and where they feel swallowed by the role. These are often bit parts of experimental films. As they grow they tend to zero in on certain types of roles that fit them well. Then they have their hit or string of hits as they reach their prime. Finally, they wind down by reverting to supporting roles or nostalgia roles.

Consider Robert De Niro, for example, who achieved fame in the very off-the-wall film Taxi Driver. He then slowly shifted to roles that involved cops or mobsters. In so doing, he had a string of great hits like Midnight Run and Goodfellas. He milked that for a while with a few notable standouts like Ronin. Then he started sliding down the backside of his career, playing parodies of the roles that made him famous, in films like Analyze This and the really depressing nostalgia film The Family.

But there is one actor who took a different course. This actor took roles that let us trace his career as if he were the same person on film and his films document his life: Roy Scheider.
Scheider, aka Detective Buddy “Cloudy” Russo began his life working with Popeye “Gene Hackman” Doyle in The French Connection. But the mean streets of New York were too much for him and after his failed attempt to arrest and convict Alain Charnier, a wealthy French heroine smuggler, he decides to change his name to Martin Brody and moves to Amity, Massachusetts to become their police chief. But a run in with a giant shark, and it’s angry kin, teach Russo that living on an island is not for him.
So Russo changes his name again, to Frank Murphy and he becomes a helicopter pilot for the LAPD. But where Russo goes, controversy follows and Russo soon finds himself destroying a multimillion dollar attack helicopter and exposing a Federal government plot to stir up problems in the barrio so they can shoot the ensuing rioters.
Shunned by his fellow officers and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, Russo decides to become a scientist. And going by the name Dr. Heywood Floyd, an anagram of “Hey, It’s Russo!”, he ends up hitching a ride aboard a Russian spaceship for Jupiter, where he kills the Hal 9000, finds God and dumps a giant baby in our orbit.
Finally, he takes a job as the captain of a submarine, where he goes by the name Capt. Nathan Bridger, before failing in that and becoming the head of the Italian mob... Don Falcone. And thus, the circle of life is kind of strangely complete.

Actually, if you hack off the last couple, it really does seem like it could all be the same man. What does this mean? I have no idea. What was the point of this article? Uh. I don’t know that either, but I liked Roy and I do find this interesting. Roy is the only actor where it feels like the main movies of his career take place in the same universe with him being the same character.... The French Connection, Jaws, Jaws 2, Blue Thunder and to a lesser extent 2010.

Interesting or no?

16 comments:

Rustbelt said...

Ah, Chief Brody. You know me, Andrew. i think we need to celebrate the height of his career in style- as in humor, I mean. LINK

-This one left out my favorite jokes, though.

#1: (at the town hall meeting)
Mayor: Uh, everyone, Chief Brody will bring us to speed.
Brody: Well, um...
Mike: Uh, we got nothing, All hail our new overlord, the shark!

#2: (Hooper knocks on the door while Brody and his kid sit at the table.)
Kevin: It's George Lucas. He's here for directing lessons.

Rustbelt said...

Oh, and just for heck of it, the love theme from 'Jaws.' LINK.

Jim said...

You forgot the time after right after leaving Amity that Russo goes undercover with the Irish mob in New Jersey, but blows his cover and has to run away to Central America where he ends up driving a truck full of unstable dynamite to put out an oil rig fire.

There are rumors that, right before that, he went into the priesthood and almost performed an exorcism in Georgetown but was turned down for some reason...

AndrewPrice said...

Rustbelt, Celebrating with humor is always good!

AndrewPrice said...

Jim, LOL! Yep! He did do those things! :D

AndrewPrice said...

As an aside, what's funny to me about this is that there are other actors who just play the same character over and over too. Tom Cruise comes to mind, as does De Niro. But somehow, you just can't create a timeline for their characters. So despite treating each character identically, there is something about their choice of movies that makes their characters more unique. Not so with Roy.

Kenn Christenson said...

Yeah, but what about "All that Jazz?" :)

AndrewPrice said...

An "experimental" phase the chief would prefer to forget. ;-)

Critch said...

And don't forget he was the head of an insurance company that he looted in The Rainmaker...

Anonymous said...

I believe that he was actually a spy or an assassin for a while. Laurence Olivier stabbed him,or thought he did, and Brody seemed very convincingly to die. Reading this I realize that he actually faked his death as a segue into another identity. I feel much better now that I realize our man Brody outsmarted the damned old nazi.
GypsyTyger

PikeBishop said...

One of Mad Magazine's best moments was their parody of Jaws. They nailed the scene where they are all on the boat comparing their scars. Shaw says, "I got this one from a tiger shark off Borneo" which is followed by Dreyfus adding "This one came from a Manta Ray off Jamaica!" Scheider points at his wrist and say, "I got this when Gene Hackman bit me during the French Connection."

PikeBishop said...

And then there's the great theory that all of Tarantino's movies exist in the same alternate universe after World War II ended with the blowing up of the Nazi high command in a movie theatre. http://www.cracked.com/article_19323_6-movie-tv-universes-that-overlap-in-mind-blowing-ways.html

AndrewPrice said...

PikeBishop, That Gene Hackman quote is funny!

AndrewPrice said...

GypsyTyger, I've heard that too, but he would neither confirm nor deny it, so I couldn't include it. ;-)


Critch, He did do that thing! Interestingly, the few times he plays something different than he normally plays really reinforces this idea to me that he played the same character his entire career.

AndrewPrice said...

PikeBishop, That's an interesting theory. I heard another neat one about Ridley Scott's Alien series and Blade Runner being in the same world.

I wonder how much more of this there is out there?

Jason said...

John Hughes once said that Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles are all a part of the same universe:

"When I started making movies, I thought I would just invent a town where everything happened. Everybody, in all of my movies, is from Shermer, Illinois. Del Griffith from Planes, Trains & Automobiles lives two doors down from John Bender. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles. For 15 years I've written my Shermer stories in prose, collecting its history."

I also heard the Kurt Russell actioner Soldier was meant to take place in the Blade Runner universe.

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