The mechanical shark barely worked. Steven Spielberg shot the thing anyway, and the failure became the most important decision in the movie.
Universal Pictures released Jaws in 1975, a 124-minute thriller based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel. Spielberg directed. Benchley wrote the first drafts of the screenplay; actor-writer Carl Gottlieb rewrote it during principal photography. Roy Scheider plays police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss plays oceanographer Matt Hooper, and Robert Shaw plays the shark hunter Quint. The film was shot mostly on location at Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts from May to October 1974. It was the first major motion picture shot on the ocean, and the production ran over budget and over schedule because of it.
The score is 7.7 of 10.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.
The shark that would not swim
The art department’s mechanical sharks malfunctioned often. Spielberg’s response was to show the animal as little as possible — to suggest its presence instead, and to hand the heavy lifting to composer John Williams. Williams wrote an ominous, minimalist theme that signals the shark’s approach before the shark arrives. Spielberg and others have compared the approach to Alfred Hitchcock’s.
That comparison is fair, and it undersells what the movie gets out of it. The theme does not describe a shark. It describes the moment before one. Williams’ two notes carry more menace than any rubber fin the production could float, and Spielberg built the film’s whole rhythm around them: calm water, two notes, calm water, two notes, strike.
The result is a horror movie that spends most of its runtime not showing you the horror. That is not restraint for its own sake. It is the only version of this movie that was ever going to work.
Amity Island has a math problem
The plot is a town refusing to see what is in front of it. A young woman, Chrissie Watkins, goes for a late-night swim off Amity Island. Something pulls her under. Her partial remains wash up the next morning. The coroner rules it a shark attack, and Brody moves to close the beaches.
Mayor Larry Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton, talks him out of it. The summer economy would suffer. The coroner, apparently under pressure, changes his finding to a boating accident. Brody goes along with it until a young boy is killed at a crowded beach.
Then comes the bounty: $3,000 on the shark, and an amateur hunting frenzy that turns the water into a circus. Quint offers his services for $10,000. Hooper examines the first victim’s remains and confirms she was killed by an unusually large shark. When local fishermen haul in a tiger shark, Vaughn declares the beaches safe. Hooper cuts the shark open, finds no human remains in its stomach, and concludes the killer is still out there.
The numbers in Jaws are the joke and the point. Three thousand dollars buys a mob of armed amateurs. Ten thousand buys one professional. Vaughn is not weighing lives against money in any honest way. He is weighing a season’s revenue against a risk he has decided not to believe in, and the film never lets him off.
What Brody does not know
Brody is a police chief in a resort town where the biggest annual event is the Fourth of July weekend. He does not know the ocean. That is the engine of the performance, and Scheider plays it without a single false note of heroism.
Spielberg was initially wary of casting Scheider, worried he would play a tough guy in the mold of his role in The French Connection. He did not. Brody’s competence is administrative. He can run a department and read a crowd. He cannot read water, and he knows it.
Hooper and Quint are the two kinds of expertise the town has to choose between. Dreyfuss plays Hooper as a rich kid with instruments and a boat, and the film is smart enough to make him right and still a little insufferable. Shaw’s Quint is the opposite: a man who has been out there, who names his price, and who carries a grievance the movie only lets you glimpse.
The three of them on the boat is the last act, and it is the best stretch of the film. Two men who know the sea and one who does not, trapped on it together.
A production that nearly sank
The ocean shooting is the reason the film looks the way it does, and it is worth being precise about the trade. Martha’s Vineyard gave the production real water, real weather and real horizon lines. It also gave it a schedule it could not control and a shark that kept breaking.
Spielberg did not get the monster movie he set out to make. He got a movie about waiting for a monster. Audiences in 1975 had no way of knowing the difference, and it did not matter. What they saw was a film that understood that dread is cheaper and better than a reveal.
The supporting cast is largely Martha’s Vineyard residents. Deputy Hendricks is played by Jeffrey Kramer, then a future television producer. Lee Fierro plays Mrs. Kintner, the mother of the shark’s second victim, Alex Kintner, played by Jeffrey Voorhees. Susan Backlinie, a stuntwoman turned actress, plays Chrissie Watkins — she got the part because she could swim and was willing to perform nude. Lorraine Gary, the wife of Universal president Sidney Sheinberg, plays Ellen Brody.
Spielberg wanted no big stars. He said “somewhat anonymous” performers would help the audience believe it was happening to people like them. “Stars bring a lot of memories along with them, and those memories can sometimes … corrupt the story,” he said. His plan, in his words, was that “the superstar was gonna be the shark.”
He was right about the casting and wrong about the shark. The star turned out to be the two notes.
The release that rewrote the calendar
Universal put Jaws out on over 450 screens — an exceptionally wide release for a major studio picture at the time. The studio backed it with an extensive marketing campaign, heavy on television spots and tie-in merchandise.
That combination is the reason the film is treated as a turning point in motion picture history. Jaws is the prototypical summer blockbuster. It did not invent the wide release or the TV ad or the toy. It put them together on one date and showed the industry what a movie could be.
The tagline sold it plainly: “The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying No. 1 best seller.”
A running order for the first viewing
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| Night | Chrissie Watkins swims; something pulls her under |
| Next morning | Her partial remains wash up; coroner rules shark attack |
| Days later | Vaughn pressures Brody; coroner changes finding to boating accident |
| Crowded beach day | A young boy is killed; $3,000 bounty posted |
| Bounty week | Amateur hunters swarm the water; Quint asks $10,000 |
| After the tiger shark | Hooper finds no human remains; killer still active |
| Night search | Brody and Hooper find Ben Gardner’s half-sunken boat; Hooper finds a shark tooth in the hull |
| Fourth of July weekend | The shark enters a lagoon, kills a boater, nearly kills Michael Brody |
| Final act | Brody, Hooper and Quint take the boat out |
Where the 7.7 lands
The TMDB audience score sits at 7.7 of 10 across 11,849 votes. That is a strange number for a film this famous, and it is roughly honest.
Jaws is not a perfect movie. The middle act sags under the town politics, and the film’s most famous images arrive late. The mechanical shark, when it does appear, has not aged well, and no amount of affection fixes that.
But the parts that work are load-bearing. The Williams theme is the most efficient piece of suspense scoring ever put in a summer movie. Scheider’s Brody is a leading man who spends the film out of his depth and never pretends otherwise. The decision to hide the shark — forced by a broken prop, kept by a director who saw what it bought him — is the reason the film still plays.
What matters most is the thing the movie is actually about. Amity Island does not have a shark problem. It has a mayor problem. Vaughn looks at a dead child and sees a balance sheet, and the film’s real horror is that he is not a villain. He is a man doing the arithmetic his town elected him to do.
That is why Jaws holds up and most of its imitators do not. The shark is the threat. The town is the movie.
7.7 of 10.
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