Review: Jaws (1975) — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Jaws (1975)

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

Stars: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss

Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb

Director: Steven Spielberg

 

You’re gonna need a bigger screen.

This weekend, Universal Studios celebrates the 50^th Anniversary of Jaws — Stephen Spielberg’s seagoing saga of manly men and monster sharks — with a long-overdue theatrical re-release. Produced in an age of virtually no cable TV and with only cannibalized network showings in its immediate future, there is no doubt that Jaws was meant to be seen — and seen only — on the most expansive theater screen possible.

Much has been made over the decades about the economic powerhouse Jaws unleashed. To this day, the 1975 film influences how Hollywood schedules its annual “tentpole” releases. Jaws launched the career of Spielberg. It inspired a string of sequels — and, in fact, made fashionable the whole idea of cinematic blockbusters spawning sequels even after the original’s finale seemed to slam the door on any such notion.

But what about Jaws, the film? Is it as good as it was popular?

Lots of movies get reappraised over time — usually some long-neglected, underappreciated gem benefits from a new perspective. Jaws was both a box office and critical smash — but 1975 reviews mostly read like critiques of a really keen roller coaster: Well-designed, professionally assembled, dips and dives in all the right places. Discussion of Spielberg’s work gave little indication that this was a man who would helm weighty projects like Schindler’s List and Munich.

A half-century later, it is possible to sit back and acknowledge that Jaws is not only among the most white-knuckle-inducing action thrillers of all time, but also deserves mention alongside the best movies ever made, period.

Take Spielberg’s script. It’s kinda revolutionary: Four years before screenwriting guru Syd Field would essentially insist that all movies must have three acts, Jaws arguably settles for two:

Act One: The Stuff That Happens on Amity Island

Act Two: The Stuff That Happens at Sea

And while the two halves of Jaws can stand alone as mini movies of their own, together they make a thoroughly satisfying whole.

Masterfully utilizing actual New England settings and real-life New Englanders in small speaking roles, in Part One Spielberg etches a Norman Rockwell portrait of society coming apart at the seams. After a young woman is eaten by a shark, newly minted Amity Island police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) plans to shut down the beaches at the worst possible time: Fourth of July weekend. Egged on by the decidedly sweaty mayor (Murray Hamilton), the townsfolk rise up in opposition to the plan. Brody stands utterly alone, explaining to deaf ears that they are faced with a choice between commerce and carnage. In retrospect, it’s a startlingly prescient scenario that played itself out 45 years later in the COVID-19 debate.

Part One is punctuated with indelible cinematic moments: the excruciating death of the first swimmer…the torturous screech of shark hunter Quint’s fingers on a blackboard…Spielberg’s breathtaking use of Alfred Hitchcock’s signature dolly zoom to signify Brody’s alarm and disorientation during the waterfront shark attack…the bracing moment when a dead boy’s mother (played by Martha’s Vineyard islander Lee Fierro) lifts her black veil and slaps Brody across the face.

Even if you have not rewatched Jaws in five decades, you remember every one of those moments, and not just because they’ve been discussed and parodied all this time. These were not merely memorable set pieces: Each event arrives at precisely the right instant; each one rises organically from a narrative that rings true throughout. (Jaws author Peter Benchley wrote the script’s reportedly dull first draft; the essential structure and offhanded humor were crafted by Carl Gottlieb, who took time off from writing lighter-than-air TV fare like The Ken Berry Wow Show and Flip Wilson specials to help out his pal Spielberg. Gottlieb’s second-most notable script? Steve Martin’s film, The Jerk.)

Part Two begins with a view of Quint’s fishing boat, Orca, pulling out of Amity Harbor, framed by a set of boiled shark jaws hanging in a second-story window. It’s a first-rate opening shot for what amounts to a bloody drawing room drama, played at sea. After having been introduced to a galaxy of characters in Part One, for the entire second half we will see just three people: the cop (Scheider), the captain (Robert Shaw) and the scientist (Richard Dreyfuss).

Again visually quoting Hitchcock (specifically, 1944’s Lifeboat), Spielberg imprisons his audience in the too-close-for-comfort confines of Orca’s tiny deck and cramped cabin. More often than not, the men’s faces fill the screen (Spielberg’s love of the tight close-up, and the painstaking care he lavishes on each one, is on a scale with the grand master of cinematic portraiture, Bernardo Bertolucci).

With Brody assigned the indignity of slopping chum off the back of the boat, Spielberg finally releases the spring he has been tightening for over an hour: the first appearance of the great white shark, lunging from the water. Seldom in cinema has such a long-telegraphed moment nevertheless engendered so much spilled popcorn. (Critics often complained that Jaws’ mechanical shark looks fake, when in reality it’s real sharks that look fake.)

Most splendidly, in a film that has to this point not wasted one frame diverting from its barreling, almost pathologically single-minded narrative, Spielberg brings everything to a screeching stop — to have a character tell a story. For four minutes, the camera focuses on Quint, sitting at a table in the cabin, relating the story of history’s most infamous shark attack. There aren’t many film speeches that get their own name in pop culture. Co-written by Shaw, who delivers it with nuclear fusion intensity, “The Indianapolis Speech” is Jaws’ quietest, and most unsettling, sequence.

They’re going to start giving an Oscar for casting next year, and it’s too bad the award wasn’t available for what may be the most perfectly cast film of all time. Shaw was among America’s most accomplished stage and screen actors and an Oscar nominee for A Man for All Seasons (1966). He will always be the squinting, profane Quint. Scheider, who made nearly 90 movies and TV shows, will always be remembered primarily for his shell-shocked appeal for a bigger boat. Dreyfuss would within two years star in Spielberg’s Close Encounters and win an Oscar for The Goodbye Girl — but he remains the guy in the wire-rim glasses and wool cap pulling a license plate from the belly of a vivisected shark. Even character actor Murray Hamilton, whose familiar face popped up in more than 160 films and TV shows, went to his grave in 1986 eulogized as “The Mayor from Jaws.”

Add to all this lush cinematography on land and sea from Bill Butler (The Conversation), razor-sharp editing by Verna Fields (American Graffiti), and the single most emblematic film score of all time (although John Williams’ dah-DUM…da-DUM theme seems to have been lifted almost directly from Dvorak’s New World Symphony), and it’s hard to argue with the notion that Jaws is among the most seamlessly structured, exquisitely paced, superbly acted films of all time.

If you disagree, go watch Jaws this weekend, then take a moonlight swim in the ocean. I dare you.