Contrary to popular belief, Jaws was not the first blockbuster. There were plenty of big movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age that carried the qualities we would later associate with blockbuster summer fare, such as generally simple premises being supported by thrills, action, and effects. But it did revolutionize that concept. It was the highest grossing movie by fifty million dollars at the time it came out, which was an incredible feat. No other highest grossing movie had exceeded its predecessor (in this case The Godfather) by so much. And though it would only be a couple years before Star Wars took its place with an even larger disparity, Jaws still was the primary model the studios looked to to appeal to popular tastes and make a profit. Not only that, but it’s marketing and unusual wide synchronous distribution completely changed the way Hollywood studios released major motion pictures. Jaws may not have created the blockbuster, but it reinvented it.
And it all came from a pulp novel by Peter Benchley. That novel has its fans of course, but the movie that followed a year after publication so thoroughly eclipsed it that the fact Jaws was anything other than this giant movie has been lost to the annals of trivia. Still, the book’s an interesting place to start because it is what caught the eyes of producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, and subsequently Steven Spielberg. It was inspired by real-life shark attacks off the coast of New England, but was characterized by some very bizarre and extraneous elements such as adultery and mafia subplots. Spielberg and others also noted that the characters were quite unlikeable. The young director thus took only the backbone of the story and the last act (greatly expanded), Benchley’s original screenplay being rewritten by Carl Gottlieb. Making these changes was the better call at the end of the day though, because much like Richard Matheson’s Duel, the idea for Jaws was compelling enough. Spielberg and Gottlieb merely gave it focus.
It’s one of the most famous movies and chances are you’ve seen it, but nonetheless the plot to Jaws is: a great white shark attacks the beach-front town of Amity Island just in time for the summer tourist season. While a wilfully ignorant mayor (Murray Hamilton) refuses to close the beach, resulting in more death, police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) teams up with marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) to track down and kill the elusive predator.
Jaws is the first example of thematic recurrence in Spielberg’s feature career. Essentially it’s the same man vs. monster dynamic of Duel. But while that earlier film is arguably more universally relatable, Jaws is the more successful at conveying this conflict. Part of this is because of how much more literal it is, but it also stems from the sharks’ enigmatic presence. It’s fairly well-known that Spielberg set out to film a monster movie only to accidentally make a suspense thriller instead due to the unreliability of their mechanical shark; and the result was far more effective than it could have been otherwise. That ever-present but hidden danger is the key to creating a truly foreboding threat. And utilizing it through suspense and tonal techniques Spielberg honed on Duel or else skillfully imported from the work of other filmmakers, most notably Hitchcock, really does amount to an ideal thriller. It’s also a very well-made thriller. Though Spielberg had shown an impressive competence given his age on his previous movies, this one especially stands out both on a technical and narrative level. Consider the framing of the false alarm screaming girl in the background on the beach while a character Brody’s talking to is obnoxiously in the foreground to convey Brody’s anxiety and attention. Or subsequently, the Vertigo-like zoom-in on Brody when an attack does happen -a device that’s used in movies just rarely enough to really catch you here. And from a narrative standpoint there’s the image in a book of a shark biting into an air tank, directly foreshadowing the climax. These are just a few examples of Spielberg showing off his creativity and understanding of cinematic language, but unlike in The Sugarland Express they service the film without getting in the way of the story. That story, basic and crowd-pleasing though it is, has nuance, is pretty well-paced and is gifted with strong characters who maintain its credibility and tension.
Though the shark is what everyone remembers about Jaws, a great deal of the enjoyment you take from the film comes from its characters. Lorraine Gary’s comical but sympathetic Ellen Brody and Murray Hamilton’s wonderfully hateable Mayor Vaughn work well, but the movies’ protagonists had to keep the ship afloat -if you’ll pardon the pun. Spielberg was actively rooting for the shark when reading the book and that absolutely couldn’t be the case in the film. Luckily, through a combination of well-written personalities, and terrific performances by the actors who informed some of that writing, each of the central trio is believable, memorable, and compliments the other two.
In Roy Scheider’s Brody the movie has its rock: a relatable, upstanding family man with conviction enough to see to the destruction of this menace. According to film critic Neal Gabler, the movie specifically offers three approaches to solving a problem: spirituality (in the form of Quint), science (in the form of Hooper), and the common man (in the form of Brody), with the common man being the one to ultimately succeed. Read this way, Brody is the vessel of traditional masculine fortitude and common sense that balances out the two incompatible elements and makes the film that much more satisfying for middle Americans. He has neither the intellect nor the experience of his two companions, but he has a strong moral compass and natural resilience. It was a great choice to make him aquaphobic too, giving him a personal obstacle to overcome and making him all the more identifiable for his fear.
In Robert Shaw’s Quint, the best performance of the film, the movie has its sensational element. He’s the Captain Ahab of the story; the hardened and eccentric hunter who’s difficult to get along with but has a necessary skillset. His USS Indianapolis monologue (rewritten by Shaw himself -an accomplished writer in his own right) is often regarded as the movies’ best scene -among all the carnage and terror caused by the shark, it’s an equally powerful and chilling character moment.
And in Richard Dreyfuss’ Hooper, Spielberg found his ideal stand-in. He was closer in age to the director than any of the other actors, and was very much a perfect representative of Spielberg’s idealism, curiosity with the unknown, frustration with authority, and sense of humour. It’s no wonder Dreyfuss would go on to play Spielberg’s next self-insert character in Close Encounters. Hooper works perfectly as the opposite of Quint: educated and pragmatic as opposed to instinctual and impulsive.
This is all very good for a movie with such dated effects.And even in 1975 the shark wasn’t all that convincing. While this detracts from authenticity it’s not necessarily any less menacing. The suspense is still built very well, its quick appearances, like when Brody is tossing fish overboard, are shocks in the best way, and at the end of the day a robot shark is just as frightening as a real one. But it does make it painfully obvious when Spielberg’s using stock footage of a real shark taken off the coast of Australia in a couple of the underwater shots. With regards to the shark and particularly in the climax, the editing isn’t very good either. You can tell Spielberg was working around boat and shark issues by his quick cutting. The production of Jaws was notoriously problematic, going one hundred days over schedule due to Spielberg’s admitted hubris.
But the egotism and perfectionism of young Spielberg paid off, and Jaws made cinema history. And while it may have done so more because of its revolutionary T.V. marketing and box office performance than its high quality, it’s still a damn great movie today. It’s the movie that properly launched Spielberg’s career, as well as John Williams’, whose essential score became one of the most iconic in film music; and for better or worse Jaws linked Spielberg irrevocably with big budget studio blockbusters and thrill-based popular movies. It didn’t do this alone, but it certainly charted the trajectory of his early career. The impact it left wasn’t entirely positive. As any conservationist will tell you, it’s had a harmful effect on peoples’ attitudes towards sharks, and it’s also the movie responsible not only for its own bad sequels, but the shark-themed sub-genre of Z-grade T.V. movies. Still, like it or not, Jaws is a cultural touchstone, and a pretty well-deserved one at that. And with its immediate success in 1975, both with critics and audiences hailing it an instant classic, its where Spielberg’s legacy as a filmmaker could really begin.
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