Chief Brody from Jaws: The most important character in 70s cinema
Who is Martin Brody and why is he so important in 1970s cinema?
He’s not the scientist with all the knowledge and he’s not the gung-ho shark killer with the tall tales. He’s something far more important.
Brody is us.
Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody in Jaws (1975)
Through him we experience the story and we accept him because we see ourselves in him. He is relatable.
And in many ways, he mirrors the film’s young director.
Steven Spielberg was only 26 when he made Jaws and he changed cinema forever.
Every day on Jaws, Spielberg was out there fighting. Dealing with bad weather, sinking boats, no shark and a studio that wanted to pull the plug.
It was the same for Brody. He went to bat for Amity when its inhabitants didn’t really give a damn - it was his first summer, what did he know?
There’s another way Brody stands out as a 70s movie cop too - he’s a family man.
And this fact makes him a one-off in Jaws as well.
In all of Amity, he’s the only one with a family. Sure, we hear about Larry Vaughn’s, but do we see them? He claims “my kids were on that beach too” but the camera never finds them.
Spielberg knew this is what he wanted the shark to really be attacking. The American family unit.
‘From early on in my career, everybody said that I didn’t make personal movies… I always felt all of my movies were personal because I’ve never made a film where some part of the story didn't come from some experience I shared with my family’
In Jaws, the Brodys bring a homespun ‘apple pie’ feel. They’re an antidote to the late 60s and early 70s. They chat about swing sets, fires that aren’t fixed yet, packed lunches and summer weather - they ground us.
Spielberg saw the darkness in 70s cinema and while he loved lots of it, he knew it wasn’t where his strengths lay, even though he helped Martin Scorsese edit perhaps the darkest of them all - Taxi Driver.
Movie cops in those days were Popeye Doyle or Dirty Harry. For these guys, due process and human rights were silly details the politicians worried about. They didn’t concern themselves with shit like that, they were there to wash the scum off the streets.
Roy Scheider was there too, in ‘The French Connection’ and also as bundle-of-rage Buddy Manucci in ‘The Seven Ups’. Essentially, they were all just Travis Bickle with a badge.
Other movie heroes of the time were played by actors like Charlton Heston and John Wayne, men who came from the ‘white hat/black hat’ era where choices were clearly defined. They always took the ‘correct path’ and if something did go wrong, it certainly wasn’t their fault.
As Wayne once said “Never apologise, it’s a sign of weakness.”
The movies were thrilling to watch but I’m not sure I’d want one of those guys patrolling my block.
Brody changed things up. He was the fresh face of 1970s movie policing. Spielberg threw out the novel’s angry, jealous character, replacing him with one of his most famous movie tropes - the Everyman.
Time and again we see this character turn up in his films.
There’s the aptly named David Mann in Duel, Roy Neary in Close Encounters, even Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones in the Raiders series is an ‘Everyman’.
The ‘Everyman’ is someone who’s got to think their way out of situations. Someone who’s a bit unsure, who bleeds and who loves. Someone who is afraid.
That’s Brody.
In other 70s genre movies more nuanced characters were starting to appear too.
Robert Redford scored twice, first with 1975’s paranoid thriller ‘Three Days of the Condor’, playing a man paid to read books by the CIA who suddenly has to start dodging bullets. Then in 1976 he’s Bob Woodward in ‘All the President’s Men’, exposing the Nixon-backed break in at The Watergate. Both are great examples of the true ‘Everyman’. Intelligent, diligent and resourceful - not a vengeful loon with a gun.
Sylvester Stallone, as ‘Rocky’, also championed the put-upon guy the same year. Balboa fought with his heart as well as his fists and after all that, he didn’t even win the bout.
Did Brody start it all? No, but he certainly contributed to the idea - at least until tastes changed again - that a man didn’t have to be either the snarling madman or square jawed all-conquering hero.
There was the deliberate move away from ‘maleness’. Brody’s not an ‘Alpha’, he’s the softly-spoken Beta.
When he leaves the station, he even looks childlike, he actually skips! What cop does that? He looks to the sky, breathes in the warm salty air and smiles to himself. He’s obviously not quite grasped the seriousness of the situation, but it’s like every day he wakes up in Amity, he pinches himself to have escaped the grime and misery of the city.
And of course, Brody doesn’t even carry a gun.
He tells Hooper that in Amity “one man can make a difference” and for years there hadn’t been a “murder or a shooting in this town”.
He sees maybe here he could uphold the law through setting an example and without a gun on his hip.
Guns don’t triumph in Jaws. It was courage, determination and belief that would eventually win the battle. Yes, a bullet detonates the air tank, but the round came from Quint’s WW2 M1 rifle, not a Police service revolver.
In the novel, Brody seems to have lived his entire life in Amity, Benchley paints Brody as a bored-with-his-life middle age burnout who’s annoyed Ellen doesn’t pay him the same levels of attention she used to, describing it as Ellen’s “summer moods”. Who’d root for a guy like that?
You can see why the character was totally reshaped for the movie. The audience didn’t need another angry, disenchanted at the world cop, they needed an anchor.
And Brody was it.
Words by Tim Armitage
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