The True Story of 'Hidden Figures' and the Women Who Crunched the Numbers for NASA

While telling the story of three unknown space heroes, Hidden Figures also reveals a greater truth about NASA.

By Matt Blitz

Feb 3, 2017
 (http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a24429/hidden-figures-real-story-nasa-women-computers/)

There's a moment halfway into Hidden Figures when head NASA engineer Paul Stafford refuses the request of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) to attend an editorial meeting about John Glenn's upcoming mission to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Stafford's response is dismissive—"There's no protocol for women attending." Johnson replies, "There's no protocol for a man circling Earth either, sir."

The quote underlines this based-on-a-true-story movie. For NASA to get John Glenn into space and home safely, institutions that supported prejudices and biases needed to start tumbling down. All hands (and brains) had to be on deck.

Adapted from Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, the film focuses on three real-life African-American female pioneers: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were part of NASA's team of human "computers." This was a group made up of mostly women who calculated by hand the complex equations that allowed space heroes like Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, and Glenn to travel safely to space. Through sheer tenacity, force of will, and intellect, they ensured their stamp on American history—even if their story has remained obscured from public view until now.

A Large Capacity for Tedium

Women working as so-called "human computers" dates back decades before space exploration. In the late 19th century, the Harvard College Observatory employed a group of women who collected, studied, and cataloged thousands of images of stars on glass plates. As chronicled in Dava Sobel's book The Glass Universe, these women were every bit as capable as men despite toiling under less-than-favorable conditions. Williamina Fleming, for instance, classified over 10,000 stars using a scheme she created and was the first to recognize the existence of white dwarfs. While working six-day weeks at a job demanding "a large capacity for tedium," they were still expected to uphold societal norms of being a good wife and mother.

In 1935, the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a precursor to NASA) hired five women to be their first computer pool at the Langley campus. "The women were meticulous and accurate... and they didn't have to pay them very much," NASA's historian Bill Barry says, explaining the NACA's decision. In June 1941, with war raging in Europe, President Franklin Roosevelt looked to ensure the growth of the federal workforce. First he issued Executive Order 8802, which banned "discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin" (though it does not include gender). Six months later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the throes of war, NACA and Langley began recruiting African-American women with college degrees to work as human computers.

While they did the same work as their white counterparts, African-American computers were paid less and relegated to the segregated west section of the Langley campus, where they had to use separate dining and bathroom facilities. They became known as the "West Computers." Despite having the same education, they had to retake college courses they had already passed and were often never considered for promotions or other jobs within NACA. Hidden Figures depicts this in a scene in which "computer" Mary Jackson is asked if she's want to be an engineer if she were a white man. Jackson responds, "I wouldn't have too. I would already be one."

Katherine Johnson, the movie's protagonist, was something of a child prodigy. Hailing from the small West Virginian town of White Sulphur Springs, she graduated from high school at 14 and the historically black West Virginia State University at 18. In 1938, as a graduate student, she became one of three students—and the only woman—to desegregate West Virginia's state college. In 1953, Johnson was hired by NACA and, five years later, NACA became NASA thanks to the Space Act of 1958.

The movie muddies the timeline a bit, but Johnson's first big NASA assignment was computing the trajectories for Alan Shepard's historic flight in 1961. Johnson and her team's job was to trace out in extreme detail Freedom 7's exact path from liftoff to splashdown. Since it was designed to be a ballistic flight—in that, it was like a bullet from a gun with a capsule going up and coming down in a big parabola—it was relatively simple in least in the context of what was to come. Nonetheless, it was a huge success and NASA immediately set their sights on America's first orbital mission.

The film primarily focuses on John Glenn's 1962 trip around the globe and does add dramatic flourishes that are, well, Hollywood. However, most of the events in the movie are historically accurate. Johnson's main job in the lead-up and during the mission was to double-check and reverse engineer the newly-installed IBM 7090s trajectory calculations. As it shows, there were very tense moments during the flight that forced the mission to end earlier than expected. And John Glenn did request that Johnson specifically check and confirm trajectories and entry points that the IBM spat out (albeit, perhaps, not at the exact moment that the movie depicts). As Shetterly wrote in her book and explained in a September NPR interview, Glenn did not completely trust the computer. So, he asked the head engineers to "get the girl to check the numbers... If she says the numbers are good... I'm ready to go."

While Johnson is the main character, Hidden Figures also follows the trajectories of Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson as they work on the Friendship Seven blast-off. Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) was one of NACA's early computer hires during World War II. She became a leader and advocate for the "West Computers." In 1948, she became NACA's first black supervisor and, later, an expert FORTRAN programmer.

Despite these successes and her capability, she was constantly passed over for promotions herself. As Spencer tells Popular Mechanics, Vaughan struggled with the same things all female computers did while at NASA. "The conflict of working outside of the home to provide the best life for your children and, yet, not physically being there. But she knew she was changing the world."

While Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) is also considered a "hidden figure," she certainly stood out during her time at NASA. After graduating with dual degrees in math and physical science, she was hired to work at Langley in 1951. After several years as a computer, Jackson took an assignment in assisting senior aeronautical research engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki and he encouraged her to become an engineer herself. To do that, however, she needed to take after-work graduate courses held at segregated Hampton High School. Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to be able to learn next to her white peers. She won, completed the courses, and was promoted to engineer in 1958, making her NASA's first African-American female engineer—and, perhaps, the only one for much of her career.

John Glenn

While these three women's stories remain front and center, John Glenn's recent death makes this film particularly timely. Featured prominently, Glenn is depicted as a goal-oriented, joke-making, tension-cutting, folksy, equal opportunist. According to Barry, that's pretty much exactly how he was.

"Everybody thinks of John Glenn as this iconic war hero... and astronaut, but what's missed a lot is his humanity," says Berry, "Glenn was in a, classic sense, a gentleman. He was always concerned about the people around him and it didn't matter what package they were in. He was a real people person."

Barry also notes that there's an "easter egg" in the film that most people who aren't deep into NASA history will not catch. There's a short scene where Glenn is talking to reporters, and beside him there's a woman—Cece Bibby—painting the Friendship Seven logo onto the spacecraft. The true story is that NASA officials originally did not allow Bibby access to the launch pad, but Glenn intervened and insisted that his artist be allowed to do her job.

Another Day's Work

There's no way a two-hour movie could tell the full story of these women; Shetterly's book paints a much fuller picture. But Hidden Figures highlights NASA's (relatively) progressive attitude for the time, driven in large part by necessity. This happens literally in the film, when the head of the Space Task Group, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) destroys the "colored ladies room" bathroom sign. As Shetterly says to Popular Mechanics, the movie also focuses on Johnson, Jackson, and Vaughn's "transcendent sense of humanity" that allowed them to endure.

Johnson would go on to work on the Apollo program, too, including performing trajectory calculations that assisted the 1969 moon landing. She would retire from NASA in 1986. In 2015, President Obama gave Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Last May, a NASA computational research facility in her hometown of Hampton, Virginia was named in Johnson's honor. And yet, despite the accolades and getting the Hollywood treatment, she told the audience in May that she was just doing her job and "it was just another day's work."

Sometimes changing the world is just that.

Sidney Lumet's "DOG DAY AFTERNOON"

By Roger Ebert 
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-dog-day-afternoon-1975

"Dog Day Afternoon" runs a little longer than the average feature, and you think maybe they could have cut an opening montage of life in New York. But no. These shots, stolen from reality, establish a bedrock for the film. It's "naturalistic," says the director, Sidney Lumet. I think he means it has the pace and feel of everyday life. When you begin with the story of a man who sticks up a bank to finance his lover's sex change, when you have a situation that has attracted hundreds of cops and millions of TV viewers, you run the risk of making a side show. "Dog Day Afternoon" never makes that mistake. The characters are all believable, sympathetic, convincing. We care for them. In a film about cops and robbers, there are no bad guys. Just people trying to get through a summer afternoon that has taken a strange turn.

It's an actor's picture. Lumet and his editor, Dede Allen, take the time to allow the actors to live within the characters; we forget we're watching performances. Although the movie contains tragedy and the potential for greater tragedy, it is also tremendously funny. But Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning screenplay never pauses for a laugh; the laughter grows organically out of people and situations. You can believe that even with hostages taken and firearms being waved around, such elements of human comedy would nevertheless arise.

One of the funny moments comes at the beginning, when three robbers enter a bank but one of them chickens out and says he can't go through with it. "Stevie," says his partner Sonny, "don't take the car." "But how am I gonna get home?" Stevie whines. Is that real? Yes, because you believe that Stevie would in fact have driven himself home and that Sonny (Al Pacino) would think of that.
Pacino has said the most memorable moment in the movie involves the delivery boy (Lionel Pina) who brings pizza to the robbers and their hostages. He's been watching the drama unfold on live TV, and when he's applauded by the crowd, he does a little skip and jump and says, "I'm a star!" 

Television turns the moment into what, at that time, was a fairly new event for live broadcasting. Sonny expands in the TV lights, strutting back and forth in front of the bank and unwisely exposing himself to rooftops lined with snipers. His remaining partner Sal (John Cazale), on the other hand, shrinks within himself. He can't believe he's a bank robber. He can't believe Sonny says he will kill people. He's offended that on TV, which has the facts a little confused, he's described as a homosexual. He can't believe he's expected to get on a jet with the others and fly to safety. He's never flown before. Asked to name a foreign country they can fly to, he says "Wyoming." The line was improvised on the spot by Cazale.

The movie take place almost entirely within a bank branch and the barbershop across the street, which becomes the police and FBI "command center." Back and forth Lumet's camera moves, on a shuttle of negotiations. The side view down the street in either direction shows their escape route, until it's blocked by a crowd that quickly forms and becomes a character in itself. At one point, making threats on the sidewalk, Pacino shouts "Attica," referring to the infamous massacre of prisoners in an upstate prison. "Attica!" the crowd shouts back, without prompting. They never see Sal, who is trembling, pale, sweaty, frightened. They respond to Sonny, first as a hero and then (when they find out he's gay) with jeers.

Sonny is gay, along with many other things. He is also a son whose mother mercilessly criticizes him, a husband and father whose wife (Judith Malina) won't let him get a word in edgewise. Asked why she didn't come to the bank when he asked for her, she explains on the phone, "I couldn't get a baby-sitter." She and her husband speak the same New York dialect. Denying that her husband could possibly have robbed a bank, she says: "He mighta done it, his body functions mighta done it, but he, himself, he didn't do it."

Sonny is many things and wants to be all things. The writer Pierson, unable to interview the robber in the real-life story, says he found the key for the character after being told Sonny was the kind of man "who would take care of you." He walks into the bank, waving the rifle but also saying, "I'm a Catholic and I don't want to hurt anyone, understand?" He listens when a teller has to use the toilet and is worried about the bank guard with asthma. He often says, "I'm dyin' here," because the problems of the tellers become his problems.

The most colorful of the tellers is their head, Sylvia (Penelope Allen), who cares for her "girls." Outside the bank and free to escape, she goes back inside: She's staying because she enjoys being the center of attention. "He don't have a plan," she says of Sonny. "It's all a whim." She may be right. Sal certainly has no idea what Sonny is capable of. In an interview on the disc of extras, I learned that Sonny met Sal in a Greenwich Village bar and didn't even really know him very well. We sense that when Sal starts trembling when he learns they'll leave the country by air. "You said if it went wrong, we'd kill ourselves!" he protests. He'd rather die than fly.

More than halfway through the picture, the other key character appears. This is Leon (Chris Sarandon), Sonny's lover. He is adamant: He certainly never asked Sonny to rob a bank to pay for his sex change. Brought into the barbershop and put on the phone with Sonny, he indirectly reveals his emotional inner life. He was in a mental institution. He and Sonny are drifting apart. He can't keep up with Sonny's emotional needs. He sits in the barbershop and talks to Sonny on the phone. This conversation was written as two monologues, Pierson says, and intercut into an exchange that essentially won Sarandon his supporting actor Oscar nomination. Throughout the film, neither man exhibits gay stereotypes. Leon is vulnerable and easily wounded, but not a drama queen. Pacino is matter of fact; in a scene when he dictates his last will to the bank manager (Sully Boyar), he says he loves Leon "more than any man ever loved any other man." He states this as a matter of fact; there's not a whisper of gay spin to it, and indeed even his wife and mother tacitly accept his bisexuality as simply the way he is.

The cops and FBI agents are instrumental to the film, but less fully developed than the people in the bank. Charles Durning plays the NYPD officer in charge, and James Broderick is the chief FBI agent. Neither one is given the kinds of plot elements that usually come with cops in hostage movies. They're unburdened by standard subplots (trouble at home, a conflict with a superior) and just do their jobs; afraid that a bloodbath will erupt, Durning actually runs at cops who won't holster their weapons. Both are matter of fact, direct, playing their roles right down the center. Many of Broderick's most essential moments come in reaction shots. They help demonstrate Lumet's naturalistic approach.

 Sidney Lumet is a master filmmaker. His book on directing joins David Mamet's as two contrasting approaches to the subject, both written with clarity and conviction. Starting young by directing live TV, Lumet launched his big screen career with "12 Angry Men," based on one of his TV productions. His subjects have ranged widely; he clearly cares for the story above all else and doesn't specialize in genres or themes. If he's known for one aspect of his broad creative career, it is films about New York, including "The Pawnbroker," "Bye Bye Braverman," "Serpico" (also starring Pacino), "Network" and the suburban "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Here he has created a film made brilliant by its deeply seen characters, in a plot that could have obviously been cheapened and exploited but is always human and true.

THE SEVENTH SEAL

As the product of a stern religious upbringing by a Lutheran minister father, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman has had a preoccupation with life's greater questions as a thematic constant throughout his prolific and distinguished body of work. By the late '50s to early '60s, his films were consistently steeped in queries regarding the existence of God and man's place in the universe. His most profoundly realized work of the period, The Seventh Seal (1957), became a global art house favorite and staked his claim amongst the giants of world cinema.

Throughout his life, Bergman had never forgotten the images of Death that he had seen rendered in the frescoes of the ancient churches he had visited as a boy. Indeed, what would become the scenario for The Seventh Seal sprung from a 1955 one-act play he had authored and produced entitled Wood Painting. Bergman had his doubts that he could ever have such a personal project financed, but he was enjoying the clout of his recent jury prize award at Cannes for Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). Bergman's producer Carl Anders Dymling agreed to back the shoot under the proviso that it would conclude in thirty-five days - a condition that Bergman, amazingly, fulfilled.

The narrative opens on the shores of medieval Sweden, where the noble knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his earthy squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand) are slowly making their way home after an ultimately futile decade spent away at the Crusades. The dispirited travelers have returned to find the populace of the country becoming decimated by the Black Plague. Having stopped for a respite, Block is confronted by a cloaked, sallowfaced figure (Bengt Ekerot) personifying Death. The knight swiftly barters with the reaper for a delay of the inevitable, challenging him to a game of chess with his reprieve as the prize.

As they play, Block unsuccessfully tries to wheedle the truth regarding ultimate destiny from his opponent, with no success. The game becomes temporarily tabled, and Block and Jons continue on to the knight's castle keep. The story's focus then shifts to a trio of traveling entertainers who are finding declining interest in their services; the impish juggler Jof (Nils Poppe), his gently loving wife Mia (Bibi Andersson), and the undependable rake Skat (Erik Strandmark). Ultimately, circumstances bind their travels to those of the knight and squire, as they encounter ever more disquieting evidence of the physical and moral blight sweeping the land.

Despite the foreboding narrative of The Seventh Seal, Bergman is still able to leaven it with comic touches, as shown in the consequences of Skat's cuckolding of a blustering blacksmith (Ake Fridell), and the moving serenity of the sequence when Block gratefully responds to the entertainers' gracious sharing of their simple fare. Throughout the journey, Death sporadically appears to Block, continuing their play until he has him in check. Block implores Jof and Mia to depart, and his final acceptance brings The Seventh Seal to its now-familiar closing image.

Amazingly enough, this most famous of sequences was devised completely off the cuff in the span of ten minutes. The unit was setting up another shot when the skies shifted so dramatically as to inspire Bergman and cinematographer Gunnar Fischer to shoot the "Dance of Death" sequence. Fridell, who had injured himself the night before, was unable to go on, and a member of the crew doubled for him in silhouette.

According to the biography, Ingmar Bergman by Peter Cowie, "The opening scene by the seashore and a few other hillside sequences were shot at Hovs Hallar, on the southwest coast of Sweden. Lennart Olsson had spent two weeks searching for the right spot. Hovs Hallar, with its sense of mountains coming literally down into the sea, struck Bergman as being exactly right. He also liked filming in the province of Skane because the light was so much softer than in the northern parts of the country."

The Seventh Seal boasts multiple strong performances by the cast, many of whom would be regarded as Bergman's repertory company. Von Sydow, only 27 at the filming and projecting a gravity years beyond, became an international star due to his portrayal of the warrior struggling with his faith. The pragmatic Bjornstrand provides the perfect counterpoint. The stage comedian Poppe strikes the right notes as the near-childlike Jof, and Andersson (Bergman dedicated the script to her) is luminous in portraying the devoted spouse. Fischer, who would lens over a dozen of Bergman's efforts from the late '40s through the early '60s, proved masterful in shifting from the stark to the serene as the story demanded.

By his own admission, Bergman utilized the spectre of the plague as a metaphor for the anxiety of nuclear war, and it should come as no surprise that the highbrows of the duck-and-cover generation were so quick to embrace The Seventh Seal. "Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough-and rewarding-a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year," Bosley Crowther declared in the New York Times' review of the day; this assessment has continued to hold true over the generations since.

Producer: Allan Ekelund
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Gunnar Fischer
Film Editing: Lennart Wallen
Art Direction: P.A. Lundgren
Music: Erik Nordgren
Cast: Gunnar Bjornstrand (Jons), Bengt Ekerot (Death), Nils Poppe (Jof), Max von Sydow (Antonius Block), Bibi
Andersson (Mia), Inga Gill (Lisa), Maud Hansson (Witch), Erik Strandmark (Jonas).
BW-97m.

"Singin' in the Rain" AN AMERICAN CLASSIC

Singin' in the Rain (1952) is one of the most-loved and celebrated film musicals of all time from MGM, before a mass exodus to filmed adaptations of Broadway plays emerged as a standard pattern. It was made directly for film, and was not a Broadway adaptation.
 
The joyous film, co-directed by Stanley Donen and acrobatic dancer-star-choreographer Gene Kelly, is a charming, up-beat, graceful and thoroughly enjoyable experience with great songs, lots of flashbacks, wonderful dances (including the spectacular Broadway Melody Ballet with leggy guest star Cyd Charisse), casting and story. This was another extraordinary example of the organic, 'integrated musical' in which the story's characters naturally express their emotions in the midst of their lives. Song and dance replace the dialogue, usually during moments of high spirits or passionate romance. And over half of the film - a 'let's put on a play' type of film, is composed of musical numbers.

This superb film, called "MGM's TECHNICOLOR Musical Treasure," was produced during MGM studios' creative pinnacle. From the late 1930s to the early 1960s, producer Arthur Freed produced more than forty musicals for MGM. The creative forces at the studio in the Freed Unit - composed of Freed, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, and actor/choreographer Gene Kelly - also collaborated together to produce such gems as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), Best Picture Oscar-winner a year earlier with director Vincente Minnelli - An American in Paris (1951), Royal Wedding (1951), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and Gigi (1958).

Because the colorful, witty film is set in 1927, it humorously satirizes and parodies the panic surrounding the troubling transitional period from silents to talkies in the dream factory of Hollywood of the late 1920s as the sound revolution swept through. The film's screenplay, suggested by the song Singin' in the Rain that was written by Freed and Brown, was scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who also wrote On the Town (1949)). The time frame of Comden's and Green's script, the Roaring 20s Era of flappers, was mostly determined by the fact that lyricist Freed (and songwriter Nacio Herb Brown) had written their extensive library of songs in their early careers during the 1920s and 1930s, when Hollywood was transitioning to talkies. The musical comedy's story, then, would be best suited around that theme. Except for two songs, all of the musical arrangements in the film to be showcased were composed by Freed and Brown for different Hollywood films before Freed became a producer.

[The title song was originally created by lyricist Arthur Freed and composer Nacio Herb Brown for MGM's Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929). The general storyline of the film was derived from Once in a Lifetime (1932), a hilarious adaptation of the Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman play also set during the time of panic surrounding Hollywood's transition to talkies.]

The plot of the film is actually an autobiography of Hollywood itself at the dawn of the talkies. The story is about a dashing, smug but romantic silent film star and swashbuckling matinee idol (Don Lockwood) and his glamorous blonde screen partner/diva (Lina Lamont) who are expected, by studio heads, to pretend to be romantically involved with each other. They are also pressured by the studio boss R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) to change their silent romantic drama (The Duelling Cavalier) and make their first sound picture, renamed as the musical The Dancing Cavalier. There's one serious problem, however - the temperamental, narcissistic star has a shrill, screechy New York accent. The star's ex-song-and-dance partner (Cosmo) proposes to turn the doomed film into a musical, and suggests that Don's aspiring actress and ingenue dancer-girlfriend (Kathy Selden) dub in her singing voice behind the scenes for lip-synching Lina. The results of their scheming to expose the jealous Lina and put Kathy in a revealing limelight provide the film's expected happy resolution.

Surprisingly, this great film that was shot for a cost of $2.5 million (about $.5 million over-budget), was basically ignored by film critics when released and treated with indifference (with box-office of $7.7 worldwide). It received only two Academy Award nominations - Best Supporting Actress (Jean Hagen), and Best Musical Score (Lennie Hayton) and didn't win any awards. The film's musical score Oscar nomination lost to Alfred Newman's score for With a Song in My Heart.

Now, after many accolades, television screenings, and its resurgence after the release of That's Entertainment (1974), it is often chosen as one of the all-time top ten American films, and generally considered Hollywood's greatest and finest screen musical. Great care was made to authenticate the costumes, the sound studio set, and other historical details in the film. The film's title song was paid twisted homage (of sorts) in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) during the brutal rape scene. At the same time that Singin' in the Rain was being filmed, another MGM film exposing and satirizing Hollywood's foibles was also in production - director Vincente Minnelli's melodramatic The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), starring Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner, and Oscar-stealing Gloria Grahame who defeated this film's Jean Hagen for the Best Supporting Actress honor.

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Welcome to CinemaVIEW for Fall Semester

Welcome to the Fall Semester and CinemaVIEW.

Over the course of the next three months, this blog will feature highlights and backgrounds on the films we will be discussing in class.

Trailers, links and other material relevant to this course will be included.

Please check back weekly for updates and be sure to access your syllabus to insure you are up-to-date.

JAWS review: 'brilliant and terrifying'

 

Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which was released on June 20, 1975, changed the cinema experience forever

by Martin Chilton

Steven Spielberg's Jaws, a brilliant film of so much more than just short shark shocks, changed the cinema experience forever. It was the original Hollywood blockbuster, the first film to gross more than $100 million.

Nobody at the time predicted such remarkable success for Jaws. When Richard Zanuck, the Oscar-winning film producer who had been behind great films such as The Sound of Music and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, started on the project the book, by first-time novelist Peter Benchley, hadn't even been published and Spielberg's only feature film to date, The Sugarland Express, had yet to be released.

The plot is relatively straightforward: a giant man-eating great white shark starts killing holidaymakers on the waters of Amity Island, a fictional New England resort. The local police chief, with the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter, goes out to sea to track it down and kill it.

The cast is magnificent but therein lies a story. Benchley had wanted Paul Newman to play police chief Martin Brody, Robert Redford to fill the role of hippy ichthyologist Matt Hooper and Steve McQueen to be grizzled shark hunter Quint. Zanuck wanted Charlton Heston, Sterling Hayden and Jon Voight respectively. In the end, the roles went to Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw.

As a trio, their chemistry is superb. Zanuck said he was conscious that having no star named added to the risks for the film but his three leads could not have been better.The main problem was the demanding practicalities of making the film. Jaws was shot on the small Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard (and on the waters surrounding it) and Spielberg, who was 27 at the time, remembers long days, with about four hours of shooting film and about "eight hours anchoring boats and trying to fight the ocean and get the shark to work".

The sharks, in this era long before CGI, were a mechanical nightmare. "We were lucky to get one or two shots a day," said Zanuck. "The shark was a mechanical monster that very rarely worked. Actually, we had four of them, and they were all hydraulically operated - very crude by today's standards."They had all these rubber-hose attachments, and there were 16 different parts that had to work - the eye, the jaws, the tail, the fins and so on. We had a barge bouncing up and down in the sea, with people at all these levers, each of them controlling a particular part. It was like an orchestra with these 16 guys on the barge, and they had to play it perfectly each time."

But the mechanics just kept breaking down. For example, the shark would come out of the water with its eye closed, and we'd have to abandon the shot. It was so agonising. You'd have actors hanging around for days, waiting for just one shot."

The problems ended up working in the film's favour. The opening segment is one of the most famous death scenes in movie history. Susan Backlinie was the skinny-dipping bather who takes a fateful moonlit swim, splashing about merrily. The silence is terrifying, the sea an endless dark pool.

Suddenly, the whelping starts, the helpless struggle against a sea monster we are left to image, the creature that is dragging her under. It's an utterly terrifying moment."In the script," said Zanuck, "we had the shark in that scene, but the mechanics weren't working. Steven made it so much more horrifying by having shots from underneath of the girl's legs dangling there, then the girl being ripped apart."

All without the audience getting even a glimpse of her attacker. "If we'd had a computerised shark, we would have overdone it, and a lot of that suspense and build-up, which was not really intended, would have been lost."Through the years, Steven has been praised for holding back on the shark and waiting, but it was never planned that way. We just didn't have it working."

"Jaws was my Vietnam. It was basically naive people against nature, and nature beat us every day," Spielberg later said.The terror, panic and small town politics are all brilliantly done but this is also a film about bravery and friendship and the scenes in which the trio bond as they sit out at sea waiting to fight death itself are moving and witty.

There is also a memorably great line. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” says Chief Brody when he finally realised the size of the beast they are facing.The beautifully simple and iconic movie poster, the evocative and haunting Grammy-winning score of John Williams (All together now: Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh…) and the scary moments (the head and the boat) all help make Jaws one of the great films of the 20th century.

Jaws won three Oscars - Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Sound - and spawned three (poor) sequels. It is as thrilling today as when it first hit cinema screens on June 20 1975. 

HISTORICAL RECREATIONS: QUEEN MARGOT - Power Politics in France

The historical novel by Alexandre Dumas was adapted for the screen with this lavish French epic, winner of 5 Césars and a pair of awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Isabelle Adjani stars as Marguerite de Valois, better known as Margot, daughter of scheming Catholic power player Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi). Margot is an heiress to the throne during the late 16th century reign of the neurotic, hypochondriac King Charles IX (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a time when Protestants and Catholics are vying for political control of France. Catherine decides to make an overture of good will by offering up Margot in marriage to prominent Protestant Huguenot Henri of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), although she also schemes to bring about the notorious St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, when tens of thousands of Protestants are slaughtered. The marriage goes forward but Margot doesn't love Henri and takes a lover, the soldier La Mole (Vincent Perez), also a Protestant from a well-to-do family. Murders by poisoning follow, as court intrigues multiply and Catherine's villainous plotting to place her son Anjou (Pascal Greggory) on the throne threatens the lives of La Mole, Margot and Henri. 

The American release version was cut to 145 minutes. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

Reviews:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-queen-margot-movie-review-20140516-story.html

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/chereaus-queen-margot-returns-and-still-stuns-6441793