Jaws at 50

The beautiful first victim taken from below the surface.  John Williams' iconic music theme is "half the film's success" according to director Steven Spielberg.

[Read my previous review of Jaws for more insights.]

Fifty years ago today, a broken mechanical shark accidentally became a revelation to Hollywood. Steven Spielberg's Jaws may or may not have created the summer blockbuster, but it most definitely created the definitive shark movie. It remains my favorite Spielberg film in spite of it only being one small step taken at the beginning of what would become one of the greatest directorial careers of the twentieth century.

As I posted in 2012, I was there on opening night in Daytona Beach, Florida in that sold-out theater when an entire audience screamed in unison at a mechanical fish that seems by today's standards exactly like what it was - a mechanical fish. But in 1975, we brought completely different eyes to the movies. If something appeared on screen, it had to be real in some fundamental way because there was no alternative. CGI didn't exist, so that shark had to be there, physically present, mechanically snapping its jaws at our faces. We knew it was a movie, but we also knew that somewhere, somehow, that thing existed.

Brody (Roy Scheider), the mayor and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and a tiger shark the town's folk killed.  But it's the wrong shark, of course.

Brody's wife (Lorraine Gary) provides an important linchpin in the first half of the movie, making Brody's family believable and the audience emotionally invests more in Brody accordingly.  Brilliant storytelling.  In the novel, Brody's wife has a affair with Hooper but that was changed in the film.  It made for a good novel but would have ruined the momentum of the film.   

The head coming out of the hole a shark put in a local fisherman's boat.  This is the first real scream eliciting moment in the film and worked spectacularly well.  Today it seems like a silly "boo!"  Made the whole theater scream every time I paid to see the film.

The first half of the film has the necessary tension of the mayor trying to keep the beaches open for tourist dollars and Hooper the oceanographer trying to get someone to understand that they are dealing with a huge killing machine.  Brody tries to please everybody.

The first time we see the mechanical shark is actually over an hour into the film.  It looks real enough here.  Screaming everywhere in the theater in 1975.

These shots are only on screen a couple of seconds so you don't really notice how "stiffly" the shark moves.

They did a great job of making it look like a great white shark. And they effectively edited it in with some actual white shark footage for added realism. But the sophisticated prop itself was jerky and unruly on screen, which is why you only see it for a few seconds at a time. No lingering on this thing. I do not remember ever being in a theater where absolutely everyone screamed over and over throughout an entire film. So the shark was effective enough back then. But a large part of that effect had to do with it not working at all.

Bruce, the mechanical shark, was so sophisticated for its day that it was very difficult to operate in actual ocean conditions which is where almost the entire film was shot. Shooting in the ocean was a bold (perhaps naive) decision and had not been attempted very many times. Instead of a back lot water tank in Hollywood, the cast and crew had to contend with actual oceanic elements and the weather, which made what was supposed to be a 70-day shoot go on interminably. As the days passed with the shark not working, Spielberg had to come up with something to shoot. So he was forced, not through brilliance but through no alternative, to shoot as much of the film as possible without showing the shark. To create as much tension and horror as possible without the shark being on screen. The results are brilliant.

Today's audiences are trained skeptics, automatically analyzing "how did they do that?" instead of just experiencing terror. They can appreciate the craft of Bruce the mechanical shark, but they can't access that primal fear because they're cinematically too sophisticated.  CGI effects make all sorts of shots possible that you could never get "on-camera."  The clunky shark is a relic from an era of cinematic trust that died the moment computers created their virtual reality.

Paradoxically, Jaws became spectacular precisely because spectacle was a rare commodity in 1975. Spielberg's film had the entire summer to itself, no competition for the "biggest" film. There were no "summer blockbuster" contenders.  More importantly, there were no blockbuster expectations on the part of the audiences either.  No one thought like that back then.  

That summer the film industry was what we might call today a “blue ocean” for manufactured expectations of being amazed. Summer movie season really didn't exist except for beach movies starring Elvis or Frankie Avalon before Jaws invented it. The film was a sensation (highest grossing film of all time, until Star Wars) precisely because spectacle was not scheduled and mass-produced in multiple forms as they are every summer today.

Now we get ten or twelve action films every summer, each trying to out-spectacular the last, and surprisingly few of them can achieve what a malfunctioning shark accomplished by accident. Marvel can spend half a billion dollars and still feel routine. Mission Impossible 15 or whatever might wow you in the moment but you've more or less seen it before. Every summer blockbuster since 1975 has been chasing that Jaws moment, where audiences stood in line for hours and kept coming back for repeat viewings.  Star Wars surpassed Jaws in terms of gross and lasting enthusiasm as the summer block buster of 1977.  But, after that, it became more frequent until we all became victims of the spectacle inflation that Jaws itself inadvertently created.

The greatest irony is that Jaws was so successful at creating summer spectacle that it ultimately made true spectacle merely routine.

The second half of the film is the quest.  Brody, Quint (Robert Shaw) and Hooper go out on Quint's boat Orca to kill the shark.  Where are the state authorities?  Don't ask logical questions, go with it!

This is the shark’s first appearance without the iconic music to announce him.  Screams throughout the theater.  This is also the first time we see the shark up close.  It is a bit clunky but still effective today, especially if you are not expecting it.

Scheider's reaction as Brody completely carries us into the moment.  "You're going to need a bigger boat" was a meme from that time.  What?  You mean like the bigger boat the state authorities undoubtedly have or the Coast Guard even.  It's a great white shark guys!

Shots of the fins through the ocean look pretty freakin' real.

Quint looks up at Hooper after the pilot lost the shark.  It’s a part-grin, part-snarl kind of stare.  The tension between the experienced seaman and the fancy academic scientist is part of what gives the film its human dimension.

Orca at rest in the evening stillness. This is the beginning of an incredible dramatic cinematic sequence that I'd put up against any other film.  Jaws is certainly not the greatest movie of all time but this eight minute stretch of the film is absolutely outstanding filmmaking.

Everybody's getting drunk and swapping fish wound stories, for one thing.  Then Robert Shaw's brilliant "Indianapolis monologue" is inserted, which sobers everybody up and let's the audience sit in silence for awhile, mesmerized by the outstanding performance.

Everybody now: "Show me the way to go home.  I'm tired and I wanna go to bed..."  singing together.  This is the first and only time all three characters are on the same page.  Then the shark attacks the boat again bringing this fantastic sequence to an abrupt close.

Bruce (so-named after Spielberg's attorney) not working properly saved Jaws from its own technical limitations. This forced Spielberg into a Hitchcockian approach. Being a masterful story teller already, he made seeing Bruce onscreen mostly in your imagination. Even when Bruce was working you don't see the shark for very long in the film, but you feel it constantly through yellow barrels being dragged underwater then resurfacing to chase the boat, blood blooming in blue water, and the view from below looking up at swimmers' dangling and even their severed legs. Spielberg had to suggest menace instead of showing it, and suggestion is always more terrifying than revelation. Once prodded, our imagination is the best special effect of all.

If Jaws had CGI to fall back on, Spielberg likely would have featured the shark far more prominently. He had no choice but to generate fear without his monster, and that trap created a masterpiece. Today's directors know they can create a realistic shark that can do anything, so why wouldn't they show it? The technology is so seductive that it overwhelms artistic judgment.

Critics clearly rank Spielberg's later films like Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln, and Schindler's List as his greatest achievements, and those are undeniably important contributions. But I still prefer Jaws to anything else he made, which might seem odd since it was only his second major film, following the relatively unknown and forgotten Sugarland Express. There's something to be said for artists at their hungriest, most resourceful moment. Jaws was made by a 26-year-old Spielberg, even then a gifted storyteller and a master of visual perspective, who had to solve every problem with physical creativity rather than unlimited digital resources.

There's also a purity to Jaws that some of his later, more "important" films lack. It's Spielberg as pure filmmaker rather than Spielberg as special effects heavy message-maker or interpreter of the spirit of history. Not a wasted scene, not a false moment, building tension like a classical symphony. It was made before he knew he was supposed to be important.

The last 20 minutes of the film we see a lot of the shark.  The audience is primed with fear at this point and ready to scream some more.

One of the many techniques Spielberg used to show the shark when the shark was not working properly was the use of three barrels.  They are shot into the shark over a period of time.  Neither Quint nor Hooper had ever seen a shark go down with three barrels in him.  This one does, ratcheting up the tension with no monster to be seen.  

The shark goes under Orca with three barrels, the ultimate shark F you!

The climax of the film.  Quint gets eaten.  Okay, yeah, it looks pretty mechanical here.  Still an intense shot.  Only lasting seconds before you get a mouth full, literally.

Not so mechanical looking.  Quint's eye view.

They call it Jaws for a reason.

Brody battles the shark alone as the ship sinks.  The fact he doesn't know how to swim makes his situation more heroic.  All odds are against him.  Okay, Bruce looks pretty mechanical here, too.  More than enough for 1975 audiences though.  This was one of the longer shots of the shark in the film.

My favorite segment of this action spectacle has nothing to do with the shark at all. It's the three men sitting around the cabin table at night, swapping stories and getting drunk. Quint's famous “Indianapolis monologue” about the USS Indianapolis is one of the greatest pieces of acting and directing in cinema history.

This entire sequence of the film, from the drunken stories to the Indianapolis to sing along to another shark attack is filmmaking at its best.  I remember being in the theater on the night of its premiere and hearing Quint tell the story of the Indianpolis and I had never heard it before.  

Since elementary school, history was one of my best subjects and I took a great interest in it.  I knew a lot about World War II but I did not know this little detail yet.  I was fascinated by not only how Quint tells it but also learning what really happened.  He's not making up anything about hundreds of men being eaten by sharks before they could be rescued.  I was in awe of this movie at that point only I was too young to know it.  It was Spielberg's magic at its summit, really.  Even though he was so young then and had so many great movies ahead of him.  I am in awe of this sequence in Jaws today.  For me it is a timeless moment that makes my life richer for knowing it. 

Watching Jaws again for the first time since my 2012 review, I noticed the John Williams score actually contributing more to Quint's speech than I had remembered.  Quint talks about a sharks eyes: "he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes..."  This is a perfect cinematic moment, it combines true history with masterful acting and directing and storytelling.  The sequence goes on to include a whale song before our heroes start singing spontaneously in unison...and the shark rams the boat.  But as a 16 year-old history nerd, this blew my little mind.

By this time in the film we have seen the monster. Bruce was working good enough for that. But we haven't seen him for more than a few seconds total. No clear shot of him. But the stakes are high and tension has been raised. This is a deadly threat to the community and these three guys go out there to kill it. In what highly regulated universe would this story even make sense today? Today the government would be taking that shark out. But that's not much of a quest and Jaws is very much a quest in the best sense of the tradition.

But it is quiet now. Nighttime. The shark is gone and the three guys are getting drunk, swapping stories, having an actual humorous moment, badly needed at this stage in the film. It's really been nonstop relentless tension building without seeing much of the shark yet. But now we need a breather. And inside that breather is a magical performance. Robert Shaw building from casual drunken storytelling to that haunting "black eyes, like a doll's eyes" description. Modern blockbusters rarely have the confidence to just stop, be quiet, and let characters be together like that. Audiences might become bored without constant stimulation.

But Spielberg understood that spectacle without soul is just noise. All of his wonderful films have a lot of human soulful moments, which is why they resonate with so many people through time. Those quiet character moments make the loud moments (even without the shark on-screen) matter more. The monster is only as scary as we care about the people it threatens, and that boat cabin scene makes us genuinely invested in three very different men who've found unexpected camaraderie before facing danger together.

Fifty years later, Jaws remains more frightening than most modern horror films with unlimited budgets because technical limitation forced artistic innovation. The film proves that what you don't show is often more powerful than what you do, that constraints can be gifts, and that sometimes the thing that seems like your biggest problem is actually your greatest asset.

The broken shark contraption made Spielberg a better director. Today's technology accidentally makes many directors lazier. We can show anything now, so we show everything, somehow making it all less moving than a malfunctioning mechanical fish that forced a young filmmaker to trust his audience's imagination instead of his special effects budget.

That's the trap Jaws set for Hollywood: it created the summer blockbuster by proving that sometimes less is more, then inspired an entire industry to pursue more, more, more. After five decades, we're still chasing the magic of that first summer when a broken shark taught us that the most spectacular thing of all might just be knowing when not to show the monster. How lucky I was to be there as it happened!

Jaws changed Hollywood forever in a way that made its own achievement difficult to repeat, Star Wars excepted. The film that invented the summer blockbuster was imitated for decades, everybody was chasing the next spectacle. Of course, it took a while to happen, many other spectacular action films followed each summer, until it finally became more expected and less surprising among audiences.   Jaws was completely unexpected, a total surprise.  

Somehow, that broken mechanical shark is still the scariest monster in the water.

The proverbial explosive ending.  The end of Jaws brought loud cheers and applause from audiences seeing the film, especially for the first time.

Jaws only ranks 202 on the the IMDB Top 250 movies list, reflecting what happens to many sensational films through time.  Over at Rotten Tomatoes it rates a highly respectable 97% from film critics and 90% among audience reviews. 

Here are some resources worth checking:

The Truth About Jaws.  A straightforward documentary with some details others miss, particularly about Robert Shaw's drinking on set.

Why Jaws Still Looks Like A Million Bucks.  Extraordinary cinematographic insights into capturing the action.

The Shark Is Still Working.  Might be the best overall documentary of the film.

The Teeth Of Jaws.  A good BBC documentary about the movie.

Jaws: Behind The Classic Shark Effects.  A lot of the challenges of the film captured in shorter documentary.

Jaws. The Top 10 Weird But True Facts You Won't Believe. A fun, quick overview well-worth your time.

Why Jaws is Still the Greatest Monster movie is a personal appreciation by a guy who has seen it enough to know what makes it great.  Excellent work.

(Assisted by Claude.)