Jaws (1975)

 

Jaws (1975)

 

 

Inspired by a rouge shark incident with multiple fatalities in New Jersey in 1916 and fisherman Frank Mundus catching a 4,500 lb great white shark off Long Island in 1964, novelist Peter Benchley wove together a solid but unremarkable pot-boiler published in 1974. Amusingly, critics praised how deftly Benchley wove the themes of Henrik Isben’s play, “An Enemy of the People” (first preformed 1882), concerning the consequences of Official Dishonesty, how easily a Policy Debate is subverted, and the tragedy of  the Whistleblower, into an escapist fiction, forcing a slightly red-faced Benchley to admit that he'd never read or saw the classic play despite a number of striking plot parallels.

 

The book was bought by Hollywood and handed to a Wunderkind Director about to graduate from television, Steven Spielberg. At the time Spielberg had an accidental international hit, his TV movie “Duel” (1971) was released theatrically overseas and triumphed above all expectations, and American USA Critics praised his first real theatrical feature, “Sugarland Express” (1974) though it was a financial disappointment. This was to be his first Big-Budget film.

 

Production proved a disaster, it almost ended he Career, but instead, despite all odds, it raised him into the pantheon of World-Class Directors and changed Hollywood forever.

 

Tom Gooderson – A’Court made an observation about a different film that applies here, “A problem with a monster movie, especially one like ‘Frankenstein,’ is that you can’t wait to get a glimpse of the monster. The film teases and draws you close before its reveal and even when the monster is finally presented, he walks backwards towards the camera and in a darkened room. From this scene on though, the monster is highly visible.”

 

Though that’s the most natural approach as cinema is a visual media, it should be "show not tell," but Gooderson – A’Court calling it a problem simply because the Monster shown late, of the Monster never shown at all, have both worked to great effect. In films without the Budget to make a really good Monster, and it’s also a tactic in most Big-Budget Monster Movies, like “Frankenstein” (1931), so the teasing seduction is no mere burlesque show, we finally do get the Full Monty, first the Filmmaker lingers on shadows and then every wrinkle of the revealed face.

 

That burlesque clearly has its pleasures (not for nothing, but in the Comedy movie “The Full Monty” (1997) we never get to see the Full Monty) and there are Directors and Producers who were poets of suggestion, mesmerizing us for decades because of their cruel refusal to never fully pull the curtain back, never wholly revealing, even at the very end; the most famous example this of course films of the great Val Lewton.

 

But Spielberg likes to think more along the lines of Gooderson – A’Courts, he doesn't just show everything, he shows it early. In this film he didn't, and was highly praised for that, but here, one of his greatest triumphs, he's almost Lewton-esque until the very end. The reason for that is simple, spelled out in, of all places, a stage play, "The Shark Is Broken" (2019), about the hell of trying to make this movie. More about this later.

Spielberg is more associated with SF,F&H than any other Director of similar caliber in the history of cinema. His Horror/Thriller credentials were earned first, but after this film, those Genres were mostly abandoned. I suspect I know why: I imagine him as a kid watching “Frankenstein” not for the first but the second time, and getting increasingly frustrated by the fact that it took so long for the monster to be completely revealed. Spielberg may have been like me, after knowing the creature, and loving it, he longed too much for its immediate return.

 

Spielberg’s earliest work were Horror and Thrillers was driven and certain Lewton-esque qualities to them (the above mentioned “Duel” and the “Eyes” episode for “Night Gallery” (1969)), all but the last fifteen minutes of  “Jaws” and then again in “Close Encounter of the Third Kind” (1977). But after that, he almost completely rejected the Lewton-esque. He shifted away from suspense and to stories where it was not only tonally acceptable to pull the curtain back early it was required.

 

Think of how early we got a real good look at the title character in “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” (1982) and even earlier we were given the Full Monty of the magnificent Dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” (1993). His only real horror film in the years since, “Poltergeist” (1982, in this case he Produced not Directed, but very much the Auteur as Producer) was a marvelous example how Suspense can reject Suggestion. I’d say the grown man never got over the child’s resentment of earlier Directors’ choice of the tease.

 

So, let’s start with open the opening scene of “Jaws,” a much-lauded Masterpiece of Suggestion. It introduces us to a group of young people partying at the beach as the sun is going down. It filmed over a period of days at ten minutes before sunset, no small organizational feat for the production. The camera captures the darkening-but-still-magnificent sky as two of the beautiful youths, a boy (I can’t figure out who this actor is, it’s a tiny part) and a girl (Susan Backlinie with an uncredited body-double Denise Cheshire), break off from the rest for a romantic skinny dip. The boy is too drunk to make it all the way to the water and passes out on the sand. Not at all disappointed, the beautiful girl prances into the ocean to take a dip. Flawlessly lit, she is both enshrouded in the thickening night and wholly visible in the last streaks of daylight as she innocently splashes in the virgin ocean. It is as Utopian a vision of the 1970s as anyone could possibly imagine.

 

But then there are a few quick shots of her from an underwater POV, and her beautiful body is now seen in a less idealistic eye, it’s now darkly voyeuristic, hungry. This could easily be one of Director Mario Bavo’s proto-Slasher films, and the smoothness in change of tone is masterful.

 

There is continued intercuts as the Stalker closes in with the guileless girl rapturously enjoying the glory of her youth and a flawless summer. Then the girl gets this funny look on her face, something unseen as brushed her body beneath the surface. Then she bobs once or twice like a cork floater on a fishing line. Then she screams and suddenly goes shooting through the water, not under her own power and at an unnatural speed.

 

And then she’s gone. Then there’s only quiet, the beautiful fading sunset and the harmless waves lapping the beach.

 

Our hero, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), is introduced next. He’s the newly appointed Police Chief of fictional town of Amity, Long Island. A tremendously appealing Everyman, he carriers himself with a strength that you know you can lean on, but he has touches of appealing and humanizing vulnerability as well. His strong family values convinced him to get away from the hassles of New York City in exchange for this bucolic Resort Town, but he’s not adjusting easily. I’d call him a fish-out-of-water except, amusingly, he’s afraid of the water.

 

The local Coroner declares the girl’s death a shark attack. Brody, knowing his Responsibilities better than the Politics of his new job, moves to Close the Beaches.

 

On July 4^th weekend? In a Resort Town? Oh hell no.

 

Jaws is divided into two acts each with its own Villains. In the first act, with the Monster shark is lurking in the background, our bad guy is the Mayor (Murray Hamilton). Not only does he refuse to allow Brody to close down the beaches, he pressures the Coroner to alter the Autopsy reports. The back and forth between Brody, a Public Servant and Pillar of Integrity, with the short-sighted and petty despot Mayor, only interested in serving the Business Community, is deftly done. This is where the comparisons with “An Enemy of…” are justified in the best possible way (I just can’t believe Benchley was unfamiliar with the earlier work, maybe it was a case of cryptomnesia?).

 

The shark, still unseen, is an ever-mounting menace as Brody struggles to defend the Public without support or proper tools. There’s a string of wonderful scenes of Horrific Shock-Effect and/or Humor, the Humor ratcheting-up the Suspense as much as the Horror because it is all foreshadowing that there’s worse things to come.

 

And then a memorable scene, utterly the stuff of nightmares, that changes the trajectory of everything.

 

The beach is crowed and Brody is in the Life-Guard’s chair scanning the water anxiously, powerlessly, while the Citizens he is supposed to be protecting frolic in the waves unconcerned. Then we start getting the "shark's eye" view again, and there are just so many potential targets.

 

Brody suddenly hears screaming, sees people running, but he can’t see what’s going on. He charges in the direction they are fleeing from, knowing he’s already too late…

 

Except it’s a red herring, it was two children playing a prank with a fake shark fin. We laugh in relief…

 

And while we were looking one way, the real shark attacks children in the other; in a nearby inlet where Brody insisted his own children stay, because it was supposed to be safe.

 

Unlike Ibsen’s Hero, driven to Madness and Revolution even before the crisis expands, Brody is redeemed by the senseless death of a child. As the Town Council Panics and Spirals Out-of-Control, 100% pure-cop Brody takes a chance and takes charge in a way we’ve been waiting for him to do all along. This break with Ibsen is vital to the film’s appeal, it is the balm that tells us Myths about who we think we can still be true. Stephen Heath wrote that it was a reaction to our disillusionment of the just-concluded Watergate scandal. Brody is "white male middle class," he represents Honestly and Integrity within a Corrupt Public Order, he is the reason we should believe that Order should be restored after the Corruption is laid bare and gives us faith in "an ordinary-guy kind of heroism born of fear-and-decency … individual action by the one just man is still a viable source for social change".

 

Brody finds two allies: an apparent Wimp who disguises a reservoir of true Manliness, Scientist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss); the other is an old Sea-Dog whose magnificently weathered Masculinity sometimes threatens to drown the other two like kittens in a basket, Professional Fisher Boat Captain Quint (Robert Shaw).

 

Yeah, this is a guy movie. Though Lorraine Gray is quite good as Brody’s loyal wife (more loyal in the movie than the novel) her Character contributes little and disappears (along with all of the men of inferior Integrity and Masculinity) when the Three Amigos set to sea. This begins the second act, and we move away from “An Enemy of…” into a small scale “Moby Dick” (novel by Herman Melville first published 1851).

 

Even at sea, the shark remains mostly Invisible, the placid water a prefect camouflage. The film’s pacing was steadily accelerated across the first act, now on the tiny boat, Spielberg now it deftly slows it down.

 

“Jaws,” is a Monster Movie that unusually chose a beast from real nature (both the novel and the film only modestly exaggerated what we thought we knew about actual sharks back in the day) and then, more stylistically than in content, it treated the Inhuman Beast almost as it were a Human Villain in a Psycho-Killer movie. There are two main psycho-killer sub-Genres: The Italian Giallo was an already a well-established Genre since Mario Bava’s “Blood and Black Lace” (1964), and no doubt Spielberg was familiar with the great Cinematographer/Director’s work. The other, the Slasher Movie, was just barely being born as “Jaws” was being made even as Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas” was released (1974).

 

What Spielberg did in slowing down the pacing in the second act (and he didn’t ignore this in the first) was that he separated himself from most other Monster or Psycho-Killer Movie Story-Tellers; he was fulfilling the (often ignored) responsibility as a Popular Artist to people his film with, well, people. Without question, the script is better than the novel it is based on; Author Benchley did the first treatment, but co-Script Writer Carl Gottlieb probably deserves more credit for the final product even though the movie follows the novel pretty faithfully. As you will see though, there were a number of other, uncredited Writers were thrown in the mix in the film version and in the end the novel’s serviceable, but cliché characters are given rare Depth and Texture.

 

One of the many expressions of Spielberg’s Genius is that, as a capable Writer himself, he recognizes and respects better Writers. Moreover, he can analyze a story, see what’s missing, and turn to a trusted colleague to provide it for him. Then he recognizes and respects his Actors, and here the central trio were all amazing Actors, pretty much at the pinnacle of their careers even though none of them were Spielberg’s Dream-Choices for the roles.

 

This Action/Monster movie is also a Character study, and that is given richest expression as we get closer to the final confrontation, which gives this film such extraordinary resonance today. Without doubt, “Jaws” is a masterpiece, while most of the films on this list are merely fun outings with a handful of great set-pieces. The background behind one specific scene is as good a demonstration as any of why Spielberg will always be remembered the way Director Alfred Hitchcock will always be remembered, while the very gifted Bava and Clark are constantly teetering on the precipice of obscurity.

 

The trio of Heroes stuck together of the small boat. They were to spend time around the table talking with each other, a natural opening to flesh them all out, but especially Quint, the last introduced and therefore sketchiest of them. Both Spielberg and Howard Sackler (who contributed to the script but was not credited) recognized that the Captain lacked adequate motivation. Sackler was the person who first brought up the idea of weaving in the story of the Real-World Indianapolis Incident which happened at the end of WWII. Sacker wrote a version that was three-quarters of a page long. Spielberg knew the Indianapolis story was the one he needed, but that version wasn’t quite there yet.

 

Spielberg then showed it to Writer/Director John Milius, a figure as towering in Hollywood then as Spielberg was about to become, and Milius wrote version Spielberg fell in love with, but it had grown to ten pages long, so not workable in the context of the film.

 

As it happened, Actor Robert Shaw was also a pretty fine Writer, and as he was playing the part, he had an intimate relationship with Quint’s voice, so it was Shaw got the Monologue down to what we see/hear in the film:

 

“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.

“Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.

“Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces.

“You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist.

“At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.

“Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

 

So, Quint is Captain Ahab, and the movie “Jaws” becomes even more like “Moby Dick" than in its original conception. I can’t tell you how many reviews I’ve seen in print, and how many friends in conversation, cite this monologue as their absolute favorite scene in the movie.

 

Finally, the Beast makes its first Horrifying, but also Hilarious, full appearance; but even then, the camera doesn't dwell upon it. Brody is casually throwing bait over the side, his face half-turned away. When he looks back, he’s staring right into the maw of a mouth, bigger than Brody’s head and shoulders combined, loaded with nasty teeth. It disappears beneath the waves as suddenly as it appeared. Panicked, Brody runs to Quint at the ship’s wheel speaks the now famous line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

 

The camera really only really lingers on the shark in the last fifteen minutes of the film, before then the film overwhelmingly relied on suggestion and John William’s classic score. (Come on everyone, sing it for me, “Duuuun dun. Duuun dun. Dun da. Dun da. Da daaaa da. Da daaaa da.”). The choice to mostly play on the audience’s imagination has been universally praised…

 

But that wasn’t actually the way Spielberg wanted it.

“Jaws” conception of suspense was structurally similar to that of his earlier film “Duel,” so Spielberg thought he was ready for what was coming; later he told interviews that he was "young and fearless - or perhaps dumb."

 

A full-sized (25 foot), Animatronic shark was built and then nick-named “Bruce” after Spielberg’s lawyer. It was a hugely ambitious creation at the very cutting edge of what was possible for FX technology of the day and it mostly didn’t work. And when it did work, it mostly looked stupid. Soon the on-set nick-name stopped being Bruce and was changed to “The Great White Turd.”

 

Mostly because of the problems with the shark, the film spiraled massively Over-Budget, $3.5 million ballooned to $10 million. Not-yet-thirty-years-old Spielberg had been granted an unusually luxurious 55-day shooting schedule, but this landed out dragging on for an unthinkable six-months. This was shaping up to be a career-killer. An irony, the delays allowed for better script rewrites like Quint’s monologue and the best improv lines like, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”  

 

Spielberg makes no bones about it, had the technology been better he would have shown the shark earlier and more often. So, the irony, the achingly-long tease before the Audience got to see the full shark is one of the things the film is most praised for today.

 

And finally, in the last fifteen minutes, when the Shark crashes onto the deck of a boat and snaps at the protagonists, are we treated to a lengthy look at it. To really appreciate what Spielberg achieved, watch the whole movie first – this scene mesmerizes – then, the next day, watch that one scene in isolation – the shark is about as convincing and scary as a rubber chicken. In context, the flawed Beast has Power because Spielberg already owns your perceptions, which is how Masterful a Manipulator he is. The old-school Suspense was to trick the audience into seeing more than is actually being revealed -- like the shower scene in “Psycho” (1960), and without doubt, Spielberg is Hitchcock’s greatest student. But Spielberg likes to show the Full Monty, and because he is so good, the Full Monty the Audience sees is still bigger and longer than the one Spielberg actually whipped out.

 

Spielberg’s career would continue to prefer the Full Monty, requiring him to always be on the cutting edge of what was technically possible. Just seven years after the hell Bruce put him through, he embraced another project wherein an Animatronic Character Front-and-center, “E.T…” but this time he got it show it early and often because the Robot operated essentially flawlessly. That same year later he pushed the envelope beyond the envelope again, in a scene in “Poltergeist” where a guy tears his own face off, and it even more unconvincing as Bruce, but in the flawlessly constructed context it’s almost as effective as Bruce proved to be. And then eleven years after that he changed everything forever with his landmark demonstration of the actual FX tech he had needed for “Jaws” and “Poltergeist,” the CGI he used for the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park.”

 

Well, Spielberg changed Hollywood forever a few times, “Jaws” only being first, but the mostly structurally significant changes wrought on the Industry were by “Jaws.” Interestingly, a goodly number of these were not a product of Spielberg’s hands. Maybe because the Producers knew how good the movie was, or maybe it was because they were saddled with its inflated expenses as an obstacle to profit, “Jaws” was marketed like no other film before it. It essentially invented “High Concept” meaning “can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise,” everything becomes about the emphasis placed on one easily communicable idea, and everything you do returns to that idea. Additional elements that also are part of “High-Concept” being Action-orientated Summer-season release relying on advertising geared toward the simultaneous release across a large number of theaters for a big first week rather than gradual release and building word-of-mouth to create the momentum for the weeks that followed.

 

Though Spielberg infused the story with subtle complexities, the essential story-line was super-simple. The poster was simpler still, so simple that school-children as young as nine turned it into graffiti (I know, I was guilty of that). The tag-line kept changing, but the one we remember was the shortest, “Don't go in the water.” The studio heavily invested in TV advertising, a relatively new idea, and the 30-second trailer left out the main cast (all admired Actors but none were Superstars so not seen as audience draws in-of-themselves) and instead drew exclusively from the opening scenes, which were the film’s most minimalistic.

 

Marketing genius turned this increasingly risky investment into the High-Grossing motion picture of all time. Then Spielberg’s good friend, George Lucas, topped “Jaws’” phenomenal box-office with his similarly High-Concept “Star Wars” (1977) and the future of our entertainment industry was forever rewritten.

 

Other things came out of this too, like the obsession with sequels. “Star Wars” was projected as a series but “Jaws” was an obvious one-off; that didn’t stop Hollywood from investing in three increasingly crappy “Jaws” films even though neither Benchley nor Spielberg wanted anything to do with any of them. None of them were low-budget outings and, God help us all, they all made money. The final one, “Jaws the Revenge” (1987) is considered by many the worst film ever made; it was bad to start with but made even worse because Test Audiences (another increasingly common element of High-Concept) were hostile to the original ending, so it was re-shot to include a big explosion and more Characters surviving. When he reviewed the film, Roger Ebert saw the revised ending and wrote that he could not believe "that the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence." This reshoot is now famous because actor Michael Caine was needed on-set again, and because of that, he couldn’t attend the ceremony to collect his first Oscar (“Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986)).

 

"Jaws" also created an industry of Imitators, but unlike other influential films that started their own sub-Genres, “Jaws” original accomplishments seemed bullet-proof to meaningful revision. Of the dozens and dozens of clearly “Jaws” influenced Monster Movies that are still popping up even today, there’s a shocking lack of original gestures among them. Both Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) and George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) seemed to be born of similarly narrow conceits, and both created their own sub-Genres but, unlike “Jaws,” there are many good films within those Imitative Ghettos.

 

As for the children of “Jaws,” I can only cite “Piranha” (1978), "Lake Placid” (1999), and “Open Water” (2003) as being original and well-crafted enough to be worthy in their own right. (Better success was found by those who moved away from the water. Director Ridley Scott’s Masterpiece “Alien” (1979) was not as strongly influenced by “Jaws” as it was a number of other fictions but was pitched to the studio, in perfect high-concept style, as “’Jaws’ in space.”)

 

Benchley continued his career as a Novelist, had a string of other Best-Sellers, and improved as a Writer getting by progressively more diverse in his subject matters. He moved away from Pot-Boilers to works that were infused with environmental activism and semi-autobiographical analysis, but never had equal the “Jaws” phenomena and cruelly, his Audience progressively shrunk even as he became more skilled. Maybe it was this frustration that drove him to finally write his own “Jaws” rip-off, “Beast” (1991) concerning a giant squid, followed by the moronic “Great White” (1994) which had Mad Scientist and a Super-Powered Monster, so it came off as a rip-off of one of the more better “Jaws” rip-offs, “Piranha.” (Not all of his books, but all of his Pot-Boilers were filmed and the two most embarrassing Adaptations were “Beast” (1996) and “Great White” (1998). 

 

As Benchley continued to evolve as a Writer, he shifted his devotion to non-fiction, the most substantive of these was “Shark Trouble” (2003) which was to be his last book (he died in 2006). He’s been a shark aficionado since he was a child, so a man who loved his Monsters just like Spielberg loved his Monsters. By the time he wrote this book, shark populations were threatened Globally, and he became a strong advocate for their preservation. In that last book he delved into the much deeper understanding of these creatures that a few more decades of science had given us. From the introduction:

 

“Shark attacks on human beings generate a tremendous amount of media coverage, partly because they occur so rarely, but mostly, I think, because people are, and always have been, simultaneously intrigued and terrified by sharks. Sharks come from a wing of the dark castle where our nightmares live—deep water beyond our sight and understanding—and so they stimulate our fears and fantasies and imaginations.”

 

Trailer:

 

Jaws Official Trailer #1 - Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg Movie (1975) HD - YouTube