Jaws (1975)
The ocean is the Devil's playground. A vast expanse of salty, wavy water in which vacationers are permitted to relieve themselves of the oppressive heat of the sweltering sun shining down from the sky. For many people, including yours truly, the beach represents the ideal setting in which to enjoy the lazy, liberating days of summertime. Even if you're just sitting on a sand chair for the majority of the day, staring out at the ocean before you, the sensation of your feet in the sand is unsurpassable, as is the view. As soon as you step into the ocean, however, you assume a degree of risk. Wander in just deeply enough to where your waist is submerged but your feet are still planted on the sand, and you're within a straight line across the lifeguard, and you should be safe to enjoy the refreshing invigoration of the water, free to ride the waves along with your fellow beachgoers. At worst, you may step on some broken shells or get nipped by a small crab. Wander out just a little too far, whether because you're unsatisfied with the level of deepness and want to push yourself to swim just a little further into the waves, or because you're so relaxed and in ecstasy that you fail to realize how strong the current is and how far it's dragging you out, and your life could be in serious jeopardy.
Usually the culprit is one of two natural consequences of the ocean: drowning or shark attack. Regarding the latter threat, sharks are majestic creatures. For the most part, they mind their own business and reside in the deep recesses of the ocean. They don't actively head out in search of human prey. But if said prey swims out a little too closely and splashes around, or cuts themselves and leaks blood, the sharks' natural instinct may kick in and do what they must to survive. As a gangster may say, it's not personal.
In the 50 years since Steven Spielberg's natural horror sensation, Jaws, swam onto the silver screen and terrified viewers out of stepping foot in the ocean, an entire subgenre has followed in its trailblazing footsteps: the shark-attack subgenre, featuring a group of characters wading into the ocean and meeting their demises at the razor-sharp teeth of one or a pack of sharks. The blockbuster success of Jaws bred a couple effective entries, such as Open Water and The Shallows, as well as some atrocities (Shark Night 3D). But few shark-themed horror films could ever hope to recapture the marriage of eye-watering, awe-inspiring terror, heart-stopping suspense, and humanity of Jaws, which remains the grandfather of the shark-attack subgenre because it placed its emphasis on the psychological effect of fear as opposed to the gruesome spectacle of a shark tearing its victims limb from limb. For the gorehounds in the crowd, however, Spielberg does reward your patience with a final-reel kill that ranks among the most excruciating and gory in horror history.
Husband and wife Martin and Ellen Brody (Roy Scheider and Lorraine Gary), along with their two sons, Michael and Sean (Chris Rebello and Jay Mello), have moved from their home in New York to the New England beach town of Amity Island, where Martin has secured a job as the new police chief. One summer night, a young woman named Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) runs into the ocean for a skinny-dip and is devoured by a shark. The next morning, her remains wash up on the beach and the medical examiner concludes that her death was the result of a shark attack, prompting Martin to commence work closing the beaches, much to the chagrin of Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who fears that the mention of a shark will destroy his summer economy. Valuing summer dollars over the welfare of his own citizens, Larry manipulates the medical examiner into fraudulently changing the cause of Chrissie's death to a boating accident. As a result, a little boy named Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees) is eaten alive in broad daylight before a horde of horrified onlookers.
The presence of a lethal shark no longer avoidable, Alex's mother offers a $3,000 bounty to anyone who can kill it, opening the floodgates for a succession of amateur shark hunters, none more determined and professional than the renowned, egotistical, and eccentric Mr. Quint (Robert Shaw). Defiant to scaring away tourists in the name of safety, Larry permits only increased precautions, stubbornly refusing to close the beaches. That is until the great white returns on the fourth of July to feast on a boater in an estuary, an event so traumatizing it nearly kills Martin's oldest son.
Riddled with a sliver of guilt and a mound of anxiety over the ruin of his reputation, Larry reluctantly signs a contract authorizing Quint to kill the man-eater. Accompanied by a wealthy oceanographer named Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) of the Oceanographic Institute, Martin and Quint set out on the latter's boat, the Orca, into the ocean to locate the great white shark and restore safety to Amity Island, subconsciously confronting their own deep-seated fears in the process.
Peter Benchley, the author of the 1974 novel of the same name, adapts his own novel (as well as providing a one-scene cameo as a reporter) along with Carl Gottlieb, and together, they split their screenplay into two narratively complete but tonally distinctive portions, the first of which is infinitely superior and roots Jaws firmly in the genre of horror. The first half examines the close familial relationship of the Brody quartet: Martin and Ellen waking up together to the glare of the morning sun, Ellen rinsing Michael's cut hand in the kitchen sink, swinging across from Sean in the backyard as they wave goodbye to Martin as he heads off for work, the four of them lounging on the beach. These people represent an all-American, nuclear family, and because they feel so real and appear so content, we develop an immediate bond with them.
Benchley and Gottlieb also use this opening portion to emphasize suspense building, establishing the natural threat of the great white shark and documenting Martin's painstaking efforts to alert the townsfolk, an act of humanistic decency which conflicts with Larry's greed-fueled indifference. Under the character-focused direction of Steven Spielberg, the screenwriters submerge their audience in overpowering waves of mounting dread. At no point is this more palpable than when Martin sits on the beach staring intently at the beachgoers swimming in the ocean, anticipating an underwater attack. Even though the shark is a product of nature, the filmmakers suffuse it in an otherworldly aura, swimming around the bottom of its ocean, scoping out its food supply, biding its time before rushing to the surface and claiming its next victim.
In the second half, in which Martin temporarily leaves his family and sets out to sea with Matt and Quint, the tone undergoes a major shift from suspenseful to adventurous, action-heavy, quirky, and upbeat, with a new score to match. On its own merits, this concluding portion is effective. It doesn't stagnate. The teamwork of the trio is infectiously energetic, propelling the pace forward while deepening the protagonists' backgrounds, dynamic, personalities, and motivations. In comparison to the first half, however, it's inferior, losing plausibility, tension, and a sense of danger. By design, this half is less scary, adopting the vibe of an action/adventure movie. The scenes of the shark hunters running around the boat, harpooning the shark with floatation barrels, only for it to constantly outwit them and disappear beneath the water, grow somewhat repetitive. Nonetheless, the ending, in which Martin shoves a scuba tank into the shark's mouth, climbs the crow's nest, and shoots the tank with a rifle, blowing the shark to smithereens, is profoundly cathartic, immersing us in Martin's well-earned exultation.
Meanwhile, Matt ultimately contributes nothing to the climactic battle between man and nature, and drops not one, but two significant objects in fright on two separate occasions: first, an enlarged shark tooth embedded in the hull of Ben Garner's boat, which would have served as evidence of the presence of a great white, and then his hypodermic spear, with which he was going to lethally inject the shark with strychnine. Regarding the former jump-scare-induced drop, Matt is startled by the severed head of Ben, a horrifying discovery that's bizarrely forgotten and unmentioned during the subsequent conversation between Martin, Matt, and Larry the next day.
Spielberg limits the jump scares to two: Ben Gardner's head floating out of his boat's hull with a crab crawling in his eye socket, and the shark popping its head out of the ocean while Martin shovels chum therein. Benchley and Gottlieb create an entire sequence out of a false alarm in which two little boys prank their fellow beachgoers via swimming beneath a cardboard fin, priming us for the actual return of the great white in the least expected spot: the estuary where Martin has sent his oldest son and his friends in an ironic effort to avoid such a danger.
Through the daytime slaughter of Alex Kintner, a little boy whose only mistake was wanting to swim on his inflatable raft just 10 minutes longer, and the close call of Charlie, an amateur shark hunter who uses his wife's holiday roast in an attempt to lure the shark, the filmmakers establish an air of unpredictability in the body count. If a child can get eaten in the snap of a finger, but a grown man can make it back onto the dock in the nick of time, then anything can happen. No one is truly safe from this beast's insatiable hunger. The identity of the next victim cannot be effortlessly determined.
For the majority of the runtime, Spielberg keeps his man-eating shark out of the frame, permitting glimpses through reflections in the ocean, such as when it snatches a boater by his arm, and insinuating its presence via attached objects penetrating the surface of the water: yellow floatation barrels harpooned to its back and the debris of a severed dock. When either of those turns around and floats forward, you know the shark is swimming toward its next target. Nowadays, such an artful withholding of the appearance of the villain is an intentional directorial choice; in the production of Jaws, it was the result of budgetary limitation. Spielberg actually wanted to display his mechanical shark more, but because it continuously broke down during filming, he was forced to contrive ways to maneuver around it. Through no intention of his own, Spielberg incidentally put on a master class in the art of suspense, demonstrating through his lack of shark that when it comes to telling a horror story, less can equal a whole lot more. He reserves the full-body reveal of the shark for the second half of the story, and the animatronic, named Bruce after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer, looks incredible up close: gargantuan, realistic, and not the least bit fake- or plastic-looking. This shark is a behemoth of the most natural variety.
Spielberg also captures the hustle and bustle of his beach-town setting, with repeated overlaps in dialogue that are true to life. In many scenes, such as when the residents of Amity gather in a town hall to discuss whether the beaches will be closed, characters talk simultaneously, making it impossible to hear what they're saying. That's precisely the point, meticulously reflecting the panic and uncertainty of a town heavily dependent on their summer income.
Beginning with the opening shot in which the shark skulks through a currently empty ocean, cinematographer Bill Butler builds a pervasive sense of dread through a series of underwater POV shots that transplant us directly behind the starving, searching eyes of the shark, looking up at the floating legs of various swimmers, relishing its smorgasbord of flesh-and-blood options. When it settles on its chosen meal, the camera suddenly accelerates upward at breakneck speed toward their kicking legs. Its fin protrudes from the ocean and hurtles forward. Butler also uses certain angles to immerse us in the paranoid perspective of Martin. After Alex is snatched off his raft and pulled below the water, Butler dolly zooms on Martin's petrified face to symbolize the wave of nauseating horror at the realization of his worst fear. As a resident attempts to ask Martin for a favor while he watches over the swimmers, Butler uses a split diopter shot to show that Martin isn't listening to a word he's saying, placing the man in the foreground on the right side of the frame and a young female swimmer in the background on the left side, conveying Martin's noise-canceling alertness and paranoia.
To symbolize Quint's increasingly Godlike dominance, Butler films him in low-angle silhouettes against a dimming sky as he stands at the top of his boat, looking down at his less experienced seamen. Most empathically of all, Butler trains his camera on the traumatized faces of those exposed to images far too violent to display onscreen, favoring the reactions to violence over the spectacle of the violence itself: a close-up of Michael's face, rigid with terror in response to the consumption of a boater, a close-up of Tom Cassidy (Jonathan Filley) sitting in the police station, nursing a glass of water, survivor's guilt and unforgettable trauma etched onto his face.
Editor Verna Fields intersperses moments, big and small, with reaction shots of secondary characters reacting to the events in front of them, regardless of whether it directly affects or involves them: the medical examiner's guilt-ridden face at Matt's confirmation that the cause of Chrissie's death was in fact a shark, clutching a clipboard to his chest; Ellen observing Martin and Sean as they share an affectionate moment at the dinner table, tears of preciousness welling in her eyes; a trio of sunbathers waking up and turning their heads in the direction of the boater's pained screams; beachgoers looking out toward the estuary in horror, pointing and covering their mouths. As Martin prepares to board the Orca, Fields lingers on his and Ellen's prolonged hug goodbye, maintaining her focus on Ellen as she runs off in tears, terrified that her husband won't be returning home.
The iconic opening sequence originates what would soon become hallmarks of the slasher subgenre, which is fitting considering the great white shark of Jaws is a natural fish variation of Michael Myers: a relentless, unmotivated, impersonal force of nature. A young couple meets-cute at a beach party, the hot blond strips off her clothing and skinny-dips in the nighttime ocean with a man she just met seconds earlier, and soon after pays the penalty for her promiscuity and self-imposed isolation. However, the filmmakers incorporate a few twists: Tom's drunkenness ironically saves his life, causing him to pass out before he can follow Chrissie into the water, and even though Chrissie isn't developed into anything more than "the opening victim," Spielberg engenders sympathy for her through the phenomenal physical performance of Susan Backlinie, who gasps in fear after she's yanked under the second time, emits one of the most blood-curdling screams to rival future scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, thrashes from side to side, and painfully gurgles, "It hurts!" and "Oh, God, help me! God, please help!" before disappearing below the water. It's a performance as brief as it is heart-wrenching, paving the way for a cavalcade of horror movie opening sequences that persists to this day. To reflect the uninhibited confidence and recklessness of youth while avoiding wading into X-rated territory, Butler silhouettes Backlinie's nude body against the dark blue sky before concealing her privates beneath the ocean.
In stark contrast to Martin and Quint's fear and loathing, Matt fosters a lifelong love of and fascination with sharks after witnessing one demolish a boat his father had gifted him at 12 years old. Larry Vaughn represents the human, on-land antagonist of Jaws, prioritizing the summer economy over the welfare of his own citizens. In an unintentional way, Larry serves as the shark's accomplice, carelessly feeding beachgoers to the shark like feeding a mouse to a snake in an effort to snap them out of their paranoia of the water. When the shark eats someone, it's just following its instinct and satiating its hunger; Larry has no such excuse. In a lesser script, the writers would contrive an excuse for Larry to enter the water so he could receive his comeuppance; Gottlieb and Benchley are too smart and respectful of their audience's intelligence for that. In keeping with Larry's personality, he gets to live because he's too much of a coward to enter the ocean. Why else would he conveniently go to the beach dressed in his work clothes?
Following the fourth-of-July shark attack that leaves one man dead and the chief's son hospitalized with shock, Larry finally expresses a modicum of remorse. Hamilton's body language reads as properly shaken, chewing nervously on his thumbnail, refraining from eye contact with Martin, mumbling the disingenuous excuse, "I was acting in the town's best interest." When Martin insists that he sign Quint's contract authorizing him to kill the shark, Larry reminds him in a breathy whisper, "Martin, my kids were on that beach too." Yeah, but you didn't pressure them to go in the water, did you? Only other people and their kids. Even after his sole demonstration of quasi-humanity, Larry remains a pathetic, self-serving, and despicable excuse for a human being. And the basis of his change of "heart" is questionable: does he genuinely feel guilty about sending beachgoers into the shark-infested ocean, or is he merely devastated by the unequivocal loss of his mayoral reputation? Perhaps a little of both? Maybe the latter just a smidge more than the former?
Each of the three lead actors inhabits their roles brilliantly. As our entry point into the story, Roy Scheider imbues Martin with an Everyman quality, projecting the authority of a police chief and the dependability and likability of a wholesome family man who loves his family and is determined to keep his town safe. Looking into his sorrowful eyes, you can see the internal conflict between following his gut and ringing the alarm bell, and slavishly complying with his superior's orders to remain close-mouthed in the name of preserving the summer economy. Martin grapples with inadequacy over his seamanship, evinced after he pulls the wrong rope and knocks down scuba tanks full of compressed air, as well as his masculinity in general. While Quint and Matt bond drunkenly over their scars, a cutaway shot shows Martin lifting up his shirt to glance shamefully at a miniscule abdominal scar. Rather than contribute his scar to the conversation, he keeps it to himself. Scheider contains his insecurity and shame in a placid, soft-spoken, timid demeanor that makes him the most achingly relatable character.
Robert Shaw makes as much of a meal out of his role as Bruce the shark makes out of his unsuspecting victims. Maybe even more so, if that's possible. He delivers his lines in an often incoherent mumble. From his legendarily quotable introduction in the town hall, Shaw nails the larger-than-life theatricality of Quint, dragging his fingernails down a chalkboard to secure immediate attention from the townsfolk, punctuating his subsequent monologue with the sporadic bites of a cracker. He cackles at his own jokes, all of which went unheard by me, but the funniest dimension he applies to Quint is his ability to maintain a comical calmness in moments of high tension. "Chief, put out the fire, will ya?" he calmly asks. After smashing a radio Martin was using to call the Coast Guard, he calmly hands him the bat and says, "Excuse me, Chief." The juxtaposition between his dramatic gesture and follow-up response is golden in its bizarre understatement. Shaw also plays up the ambiguity of Quint's motivation in this scene. Does he destroy the radio because he wants the $10,000 all for himself, or because he doesn't want anyone but him to snuff out the shark?
As the hunt nears its end, Shaw grows increasingly more unhinged, yelling at Matt to back off and pushing him down from the crow's nest. While many of his words are rendered incoherent, Shaw's monologue about the origin of his quest for vengeance is chilling and spellbinding. Reciting in a voice low and solemn, with eyes focused, unblinking, and intense, Shaw paints an evocative reenactment of the incident that forever changed his life (and view of sharks) without the aid of a flashback.
In the end, Quint's single-minded obsession with killing the shark literally consumes him whole, positing the daringly disheartening message that facing your fear doesn't always conquer it. Spielberg pulls no punches in delivering that message either. Quint's death is the most graphic, jaw-dropping, and visceral of the entire movie, immersing us in his prolonged agony without turning away. As he slides across the waterlogged boat straight into the jaws of the shark, the sound designers amplify the crunch as the shark's teeth chomp on his leg and torso. Editor Fields cuts to a close-up of blood erupting from his mouth. This harrowing set piece strikes a jarring note in a film previously characterized by restraint, both in its kills and lack thereof, and I mean that as a compliment.
Spielberg's frequent composer, John Williams, contributes one of the most iconic scores in the history of horror cinema and perhaps the most renowned of his career, earning himself a unanimously deserved Academy Award for Best Original Score. Menacing, heart-pounding, and dreadful in the literal sense of the term, the shark theme, a simple alternating pattern of two notes, is a masterpiece of musical suspense-building, accompanying the shark's appearances to signify its presence and forewarn the impending danger it poses. Spielberg avoids the risk of overuse. It would have been easy to play the music during the false-alarm cardboard-fin sequence, but he resists the temptation, judiciously withholding it until the sight of the real threat: the shark swimming its way toward the estuary. Musically, Spielberg is telling us that if we don't hear the shark theme, we can consider ourselves safe, but the second it starts up, someone is about to be turned into chum. The music begins like a predatory rumble, slowly ratcheting up a sense of dread, growing louder and faster, then as the shark's POV rushes toward its selected prey, the theme rises to a deafening crescendo, typically climaxing with a brutal kill.
If there's a major criticism to be leveled against Jaws, it has nothing to do with the movie itself, but rather the MPAA, who, in their infinite wisdom, awarded this movie an astonishingly absurd PG rating. In no way, shape, or form is Jaws a child-appropriate or family-friendly horror movie. If everything up until Quint's death warrants a hard PG-13, then by the time the shark carries his lifeless corpse below the surface, this has definitively swum into R-rated waters. It isn't as if in 1975, such a restrictive rating hadn't yet been put in place. It was applied to The Exorcist just two years earlier.
That potentially traumatizing lapse of judgment from the MPAA aside, Jaws remains a summer blockbuster of the highest order, an excursion into the depths of suspense that's every bit as exciting, beautifully filmed, masterfully scored, and powerfully acted as the summer it first traumatized audiences out of the ocean 50 years ago. It set the standard for the shark-attack horror subset that will likely never be matched or surpassed by any of the countless imitators its success inspired. And now that we're in the early days of summer, what better time to give this stone-cold horror classic a revisit? But make no mistake, regardless of the season in which you watch it, the teeth of Jaws will remain equally as sharp and ferocious.
8.2/10
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