Jaws (1975) Director: Steven Spielberg
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat…”
★★★★★
Based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel of the same name, Jaws is the classic horror film that effectively created the summer blockbuster. It is about a massive great white shark plaguing a summer New England resort town. Writer Peter. Benchley, who later regretted creating fear-based literature focused on sharks, actually makes a small cameo as a reporter in the film. He co-wrote the screenplay (as well as several follow-up Jaws movies).
The setting is Amity Island, a small tourist town off the coast of New England (shot on location in Martha’s Vineyard). The 4th of July weekend is around the corner and the town is bustling in preparation for the height of the tourist season. At the beginning of the film, a young girl swims naked at sunrise after happily departing a teenage beach party with her drunken beau, and while swimming she is brutally attacked and killed by a shark. The town’s brand new police chief is originally from New York –Martin Brody (played by Roy Scheider – his most notable role)– and he decides to close the beaches, but he is pressured to reverse this decision and leave the beaches open by the mayor of Amity who fears businesses and tourism will suffer. A bounty of $10,000 is placed on the killer shark, and an oceanographic expert named Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss) arrives and grows gravely concerned about the situation. Brody plays the relatively weak protagonist, an everyman who serves at the whims of local politics, while Hooper plays the role of a snide poindexter whose intellectualism comes across as elitist and condescending. A group of fishermen believe they catch the killer shark, which allows everyone in town to breathe a sigh of relief, but then Brody and Hooper travel in his boat at night to discover a sunken ship that has been torn apart –Hooper goes diving and spots a huge great white shark tooth stuck in its hull. Hooper quickly swims back up to the surface after seeing a floating dead body in the water. After reporting their findings, the Mayor of Amity refuses to listen to these ignorant outsiders and he decides to keep the beaches open. Over the weekend, the beaches become crowded with tourists. A pair of boys play a prank with a faux shark fin which concerns and distracts a great many people, meanwhile the true shark strikes and kills a kayaker in a nearby shallow bay where Brody’s son is playing. The attack sends the boy into shock. Now the film becomes personal for Chief Brody. He convinces the Mayor to hire an old hand named Quint (played by Robert Shaw, a classic Hollywood actor who appeared in such films as The Sting, A Man for All Seasons, and From Russia With Love). Quint is a grizzled local sailor who has hunted many sharks. His expertise allows us to feel secure that a steady hand will finally bring an end to the shark attacks. Brody, Hooper, and Quint then set out in Quint’s boat, ironically named the “Orca,” and soon they encounter the shark –a 25 feet long great white which leads Brody to famously comment: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat…”
The trio attempts to track the shark by shooting it with a harpoon gun attached to floating barrels. In one of the memorable scenes in the film, both Hooper and Quint spend the night drinking and exchanging battle scars and stories while Brody listens. Quint reveals himself to be a survivor of the tragedy aboard the USS Indianapolis, a ship carrying vital pieces for “Little Boy” (the atomic bomb) to a US base in the Philippines, but on the return trip it was torpedoed by the Japanese. While bobbing in the water, many of the men were picked off by sharks (hence why Quint possesses such a dark vendetta against sharks). Nearly 1,200 men fell into the water, and only 300 or so survived. Suddenly, the shark returns to the “Orca” and begins ramming into the hull, as in the infamous story of the Essex, and Quint is driven mad (like Captain Ahab) to kill the shark. He destroys the boat’s mode of communication, and the “Orca” begins taking on considerable water. Quint attempts to steer the boat back inward rather than out to sea (at Hopper’s suggestion) but in a mad state, he burns out the engine. In a last ditch effort, they send Hooper down in a shark cage with a poison-tipped spear, but the shark utterly decimates the cage forcing Hooper to hide in a cove underwater (in the original script he dies, but they re-wrote this portion of the script after capturing excellent footage of a shark attacking an underwater cage off the coast of Australia). As the boat is sinking, the massive shark continues to destroy the boat. In a particularly gruesome scene, the shark violently snaps Quint in half and kills him –the old grizzled expert has been relatively easily eliminated as horror begins to sink in again. Brody shoves one of the scuba gas canisters into the sharks mouth, and as the boat is nearly sunk, he floats downward with the crow’s nest of the “Orca” shooting his gun several times, until finally a bullet strikes the tank in the shark’s huge mouth and it explodes, sending bits of the bloody shark’s carcass all over the area. Brody and Hooper laugh while swimming back to shore via the floating barrels. At the end of Jaws, we are left with an ominous thought in the back of our minds –what other cretins might be lurking beneath the infinite waves?
Spielberg initially had to be convinced to continue this project since he hopes not to be a type-cast director, and he wasn’t impressed with some of the subplots in the novel. He is quoted as suggesting all the main characters in the novel are extremely unsympathetic –Spielberg was actually hoping the shark would kill them all in the end. As with many films of the era, Jaws was bogged down in budget and timing issues, it was slowed due to New England weather as well as mechanical issues with the shark. Amazingly, as a point of note, the shark does not actually fully appear in the film until two-thirds of the way through it (a technique borrowed from Hitchcock). But when we do finally see the shark, it is truly frightening. The use of gags and props was remarkably well-done in Jaws –such as in the opening scene which features a nude woman attached to a crane device which yanked her underwater without telling her, thus creating the true effect of terror. Naturally, John Williams composed the iconic Academy Award-winning score for Jaws, a score which includes the dramatic dual note crescendo of “E to F” or perhaps “F to F#.” Fun fact: when Robert Shaw sings “Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies…” in Jaws, it is actually a nod to a film from earlier in his career. He sang the same song decades earlier in The Buccaneer (1956) (albeit changing the song’s destination from “England” to “Boston”).
Jaws remains a gripping blockbuster monster film. It is simple and concise, while deeply toying with our cultural fears of the great briny depths. Popular fears of sharks and other oceanic monsters in the film is contrasted with the relative feeling of safety in a quiet little tourist town like Martha’s Vineyard. A classic technique of horror films, Jaws allows the audience a bit of dramatic irony as we become aware of the very serious threat of a shark attack, while everyone else in Amity remains blissfully unaware of the danger lurking just beneath the ocean. In the first part of the film, we learn of the true gravity of the situation alongside Chief Brody, but he soon feels relieved when a shark is caught, and by the middle portion of the film, we in the audience are the still aware of the danger posed by the shark even more so than Chief Brody. We begin the film feeling a psychological safety/kinship with Chief Brody, and gradually those feelings move to Matt Hooper as a result of his intelligence and understanding of the situation, and finally we feel secure with the character of Quint thanks to gritty know-how and his vast experience on the ocean. However as the movie progresses, all the feelings of safety disappear as no one listens to Hooper, the boat sinks, Quint is violently killed, and Brody and Hooper are then left exposed in extremely dangerous waters. This is the key to the tension in the story –building up illusory walls of safety, only to rapidly tear them all down.
Credits:
- Director: Steven Spielberg
- Screenplay: Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb
- Based on: Jaws by Peter Benchley
- Produced by: Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown
- Starring:
- Roy Scheider…..Martin Brody
- Robert Shaw…..Quint
- Richard Dreyfuss…..Matt Hooper
- Lorraine Gary…..Ellen Brody
- Murray Hamilton…..Mayor Larry Vaughn
- Susan Backlinie…..Christine “Chrissie” Watkins (the woman from the beach party in the opening scene)
- Cinematography: Bill Butler
- Edited by: Verna Fields
- Music by: John Williams
- Production Companies: Zanuck/Brown Company, Universal Pictures
Other Notes:
- Behind-the-scenes of Jaws is the stuff of legend. The making of this film was tumultuous to say the least. The film was initially slate to film for 60 days, it grew to 157 days, the budget ballooned from $4 million to $14 million, he mechanical shark did not work and was nicknamed “Bruce” after Spielberg’s lawyer Bruce Ramer, and Spielberg insisted on filming the movie in the open Atlantic Ocean which wildly increased costs.
- John Voight was the initial choice of Spielberg for Matt Hooper and Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges but they all declined. Richard Dreyfuss initially turned down the role but later changed his mind. But when he arrived on set, he was insecure, brandishing New York times reviews of a recent film he did, and quickly drew the ire of Robert Shaw.
- Casting Quint was a challenge. Initially Lee Marvin declined because he was on a fishing trip and didn’t want to be disturbed. Sterling Hayden also passed due to his IRS troubles. Robert Shaw, fresh off The Sting, was selected. But he came with baggage, facing heavy tax liabilities from Britain, so it was needed to fly him to and from Canada to avoid legal troubles. he lived in a small, isolated shack apart from the rest of the cast and crew. He drank heavily and fraternized with local fishermen. He was tempestuous and competitive; he once challenged Darryl Zanuck to a fist-fight after losing a game of ping-pong.
- Robert Shaw was a 47-year-old hard-drinking film veteran in the tradition of Albert Finney, Richard Harris, and Peter O’Toole; while Richard Dreyfuss was an arrogant, insecure, brash, young 26-year-old rising star. Robert Shaw would tease and humiliate Richard Dreyfuss to no end, calling him fat, challenging him to jump off the top of the mast, and generally mocking him. One day, while drinking on the set, Robert Shaw offhandedly remarked, “I wish I could stop drinking” pointing toward Richard Dreyfuss. So, in response, Dreyfuss grabbed his bottle and tossed it into the ocean. It sent a hushed quiet throughout the crew. Shaw laughed it off but later shot Dreyfuss in the face with a hose causing Dreyfuss to lose his temper.
- By this point, Robert Shaw was more concerned with his writing than his acting (his play The Man in the Glass Booth was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize). He helped to rewrite his character’s backstory and his famous speech in Jaws, despite his constant drinking.