Jaws (1975) Review
10/10
A girl goes swimming at night off a Massachusetts island and something takes her. The police chief wants to close the beaches, the town council wants the Fourth of July, and the argument between those two positions is the whole film.
The 10 is for a picture with nothing wrong with it. Every scene belongs, the three leads are perfectly balanced, the shark works because it’s mostly absent, and the structure divides cleanly into a town half and a boat half that each play by different rules. It also invented the modern release pattern, the summer blockbuster and the idea that a film can open everywhere at once. Half of what is wrong with the industry now traces to this film succeeding. That’s not a mark against it.
Jaws is as close to a perfect movie as I know. I can’t find a wasted minute in it, and whenever I try to pick its best moment I change my mind between the Indianapolis speech, Scheider on the beach and that yellow barrel breaking the surface. If a film ever got a 10 from me without a fight, it’s this one.
The Shark Did Not Work
Three pneumatic sharks were built. Salt water destroyed them, they sank, they failed to open their jaws on cue, and the crew nicknamed the rig after Spielberg’s lawyer. The schedule went from fifty-five days to a hundred and fifty-nine.
So Spielberg shot around it, and the workarounds are now the grammar of suspense. The yellow barrels on the surface stand in for the animal. A point-of-view camera under the water at swimmer height. A dock pulled apart and dragged out to sea. John Williams’s two notes.
The first act contains almost no shark. What it contains is evidence of a shark, which is a completely different and more effective thing, because evidence requires the audience to assemble the threat themselves. When the animal finally appears, roughly eighty minutes in, it arrives with the weight of everything the film has withheld. Spielberg has said the malfunction made the film, and it’s worth taking him literally. A working shark would have produced a monster movie.
The estuary attack is the proof. A pond, a small boy, a rowboat, and the animal reduced to a shape and a wake. Nothing is clearly visible and it’s the most frightening sequence in the film, because the audience has to keep guessing at what is happening from fragments.
That estuary scene scares me more than any shark attack I can think of in any film. I never get a clean look at anything, so my own imagination supplies what Spielberg couldn’t show with a broken mechanical shark, and my imagination is much nastier.
Withholding your threat isn’t coyness. It transfers construction of the threat to the reader, who will always build something worse than you can describe, and who then owns it. Substitute an object for the thing. Barrels, a fin, a torn dock, a severed piece of jetty moving against the tide. The reader tracks the object and supplies the animal behind it. That costs you nothing and works every time.
Then show it once, late, and briefly. The reveal should confirm the reader’s construction and not replace it. That means keeping the appearance short enough that they can’t examine it.
The First Half Is About a Town
Everything before the boat is a political film. Brody wants the beaches closed. Mayor Vaughn won’t do it because Amity depends on summer money, and I find him more frightening than the shark. He’s a reasonable man weighing a hypothetical death against a certain bankruptcy, and his calm, sensible tone is what makes him so chilling.
That’s why the film survives being a shark picture. The pressure on Brody is institutional. He’s a new man on the island, from New York, unsure of his standing, and the people managing him have lived there for generations and are entirely reasonable in tone.
The Kintner boy’s death is the turn, and the film pays it properly. His mother slaps Brody in front of the town and tells him she knows he knew, and the film doesn’t let him off. He signed the order to keep the beaches open.
Roy Scheider’s performance is the most underrated of the three. He plays a competent man being ground down by procedure, afraid of the water, and the fear is never remarked upon by anybody. The dolly zoom on the beach is his moment. Brody sees something in the water, the background rushes toward him while he stays fixed, and the shot puts the audience inside a man whose worst expectation has just been confirmed. It cost almost nothing and it’s the single most copied shot in the picture.
Three Men on a Boat
The second half discards the town entirely and becomes a chamber piece with three characters in a confined space. That’s a radical structural decision for a monster film. The film differentiates the three by class and expertise. Quint is a working fisherman who despises credentials, Hooper is a rich academic with equipment, Brody is neither and knows it. Their conflict isn’t about the shark, it’s about who is allowed to be in charge.
The scar-comparing scene is the film’s best writing. Three men drunk, showing each other injuries, competing amiably, and then Quint tells the Indianapolis story and the tone drops out of the scene completely. Robert Shaw’s delivery of that monologue is the high point of the picture. It’s a long piece of speech in a film that’s been almost entirely visual, it explains the man’s entire character retroactively, and the film has the discipline to let it run without a cutaway.
Restructuring at the midpoint is available and underused. The first half of this film has a large cast, exteriors and a political argument. The second has three men and a boat. Neither half would work at feature length alone. Differentiate a small cast by what they know and how they earned it. Quint, Hooper and Brody could be a fisherman, a scientist and an administrator in any story, and their friction generates dialogue without any plot required. Place your longest speech where a character has already been established through action. The Indianapolis monologue works because we’ve watched Quint for forty minutes and thought we understood him.
Williams and the Two Notes
The score is two alternating notes, low, accelerating. Spielberg reportedly laughed when Williams first played it, assuming it was a joke.
It works because it’s a proximity theme. Speed equals distance. The audience learns the rule inside the first two minutes of the film and then the score can be used as information for the remaining two hours.
It also permits the film’s best trick. That’s silence. Once the audience associates the motif with the animal, its absence becomes reassurance, and the film can attack without it and violate a rule the score itself taught.
I’d put those two notes up against any film score ever written. A child could hum them, and they do more work than most full orchestras manage. The silent attack is my favorite trick in the whole picture, because the score spends so long teaching me its rule just so it can break it.
Williams won the Academy Award, along with editing and sound. The film lost Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That’s a defensible outcome in a strong year. Verna Fields took the editing award and deserved it for more than assembly. A great deal of the shark’s presence exists only in cutting, in how long a shot is held before the water breaks and how quickly the film moves away once it has. The animal is largely an editing effect.
What It Did to the Business
It cost around nine million dollars, went three times over its schedule, and took over four hundred and seventy million worldwide, becoming the highest grossing film ever made until Star Wars two years later. Universal had expected a competent genre picture from a young television director and got the biggest film in history.
Universal released it on a scale nobody had used for a film of this kind, opening on hundreds of screens at once with a national television advertising campaign. Before this, films opened in a few cities and expanded on word of mouth over months. That pattern is now the only pattern. Wide simultaneous release, television saturation, summer scheduling, and an expectation that a film makes most of its money in its opening days. Every consequence of that, good and bad, starts here.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this legacy. Every bloated summer tentpole with a marketing budget bigger than its script can trace its family tree back to Jaws, and it’s a sour inheritance. None of it is Spielberg’s fault. He made a great film, and the studios spent the next fifty years copying the release plan instead of the craft.
The other consequence was ecological and Spielberg has expressed regret about it. Shark populations were hunted heavily in the years after the film, and the animal’s reputation has never recovered from a picture in which it’s a machine that doesn’t appear.
A constraint that forces you off your first plan is often the best thing that happens to a project. The technique you invent to work around a failure is yours, and it’s usually better than the thing you intended. The condition is that you have to accept the constraint instead of fighting it. Spielberg spent months trying to make the shark work and then changed the film, and the change is the reason anybody remembers it.
Practical version: when a scene won’t work as written, ask what it would look like if the element you can’t deliver were simply absent. Half the time the absence is the better scene.
Should you watch Jaws?
Yes, and watch the first half with attention to the mayor. The film is remembered for a boat, a monologue and two notes, and underneath all of it is an argument about a town that can’t afford to be careful. I give it a 10 because I can’t point to a scene I’d cut or a performance I’d change, and because a shark that barely worked pushed Spielberg into the smartest filmmaking of his career. The imitations all show more shark, and they’re all weaker for it.
