Jaws (1975)

The story of Jaws is the story of salvage. The young wunderkind Steven Spielberg, after a successful three years of TV directing career was beginning to feel the production of only his second proper film – Duel  was initially shot for TV and promoted to a limited cinema excursion due to some impressed executives – was slipping away. Shooting his horror monster film in the natural location of Martha’s vineyard rather than on a studio water tank had escalated the schedule and budget far beyond its original thresholds due to poor weather and the complicating logistics of shooting at sea. His only star, the heavy drinking Robert Shaw was unreliable and a disruptive presence on set. Most damingly, the various models he had built for the natatory carnivore (memorably nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer) simply didn’t work, and malfunction after malfunction violated the patience and professionalism of the crew, cast and most crucially the purse holding executives. But eventually the filming was completed, and alongside diligent editor Verna Fields and musical score composer John Williams – in 1975 also only credited with TV theme work – in the crucial post production phase these three not only rescued the $9 million movie but birthed one of the most iconic and financially successful films of all time, with a devastating worldwide haul of $470 million, and an unsettling promise to make people afraid to go swimming at the beach in a not dissimilar manner to how Hitchcock made a generation nervous of taking a shower. Well, since I’ve invoked the spectre of the master of suspense let’s get along with it shall we, the second kill is simply Hitckcockian;

This is such a modern sequence,as effortlessly arresting as it was 37 years ago, the visual feints and chicanery are superbly marked, and the frequent use of POV from Chief Brody’s (the sadly missed Roy Scheider) perspective puts us firmly into his sand choked sneakers, and of course the final dolly / zoom is now visual cliché, originally designed and executed by Hitch back in 1958 to suggest rising panic and simultaneous plunging fear. From that brilliantly arranged sequence you can see the embryonic Spielberg at his early best, as Jaws like many of his later popcorn pictures are built around skillfully constructed set-pieces, from the peaks of Indiana Jones derring-do, from the T-Rex appearance in Jurassic Park, from the electrifying battles in Saving Private Ryan  the to the martian malevolence in War Of The Worlds he is one of the most instinctively emotional directors, making us care for his protagonists in early, establishing sequences, with an effortless, almost supernatural ability to conjure persuasive family dynamics which may be one of his most unique skills, before plunging them into magical realist, breathless peril. In the case of Jaws alternate voices claim that is was Fields who suggested cutting back on showing the beast and letting the accelerating music fill in the gaps, as much of the actual creature footage looked fake and was essentially unusable, but whatever the origins it was the combined input of the triumvirate that salvaged the project in the editing room, and convinced a nervous Universal to open the picture on an unprecedented 450 screens (as an aside The Avengers opened on a staggering 4,439 screens) to become one of the most successful pictures, fiscally speaking, of all time. But the best scene in Jaws is fathoms away from excited cutting or stirring music, it is of course the now legendary USS Indianapolis speech, as we can see here;

As usual with these things the scene has entered Hollywood legend with the usual claims being skimmed across the various participants, Robert Shaw for example claims to have improvised  the soliloquy but I’m more convinced of John Milius barking the terrifying tale down the phone to Spielberg the night before the scene was shot. Regardless of origin it really kicks the film up a notch from an enjoyable aquatic romp that is saturated with the thrills and suspense of the big summer blockbuster to another level, from this the film birthed the meme of the so called ‘high concept’ project – a lethal shark attacks a quiet coastal community during summer, an off duty wise cracking cop gets stuck in a hostage crisis during Christmas,  a mystical pensioner hangs around with a farmboy, snogs his sister then blows his load into the guts of a futuristic terror weapon – whatever the genesis it still has the jury split on whether the tsunami of subsequent films drowned out the individual directorial voices that marked the Seventies as the high watermark of American Cinema since the 1930’s, and now are more fascinated with marketing schedules or maximum screen exposure than the actual quality of the final project. It’s an interesting argument, personally speaking I was raised on a diet of Jaws, E.T, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Indiana Jones, and of course Star Wars, it was these adventures that sparked the celluloid rush that still runs rampant through this cineastes veins, but when you see where things have got to forty years later you do yearn for some more challenging and rewarding material amongst the superheros costumes, stale rom-coms and morally objectionable juvenile adaption of whatever  is the current young adult reading zeitgeist, something with a least a smidgen of social resonance or political opinion, rather than the hypnotic, desperate grab for maximum penetration of the pictures quartet of core demographics. Or something.

So what does the masticating behemoth represent? Jeez, I dunno, Nixon maybe, or probably Capitalism or something, I prefer to look at Jaws on a buoyantly visceral, erm surface level; and enjoy it for the simple thriller that is, with maybe some levels of man versus beast, of our species maybe being the smartest on the surface of our shrinking planet but a timely reminder that we can still become a snack for our fellow creatures, an echo of our forebears who crouched in the shadows of  the more dominant and ravenous genus. Like may of its contemporaries of the era such as  The Godfather, Badlands, Apocalypse Now or Taxi Driver  it is perfectly cast with Scheider perfectly agreeable as the new cop in town with a decent, resigned affection for his new community, with Dreyfus as the nebbish oceanic expert, and of course Robert Shaw as the abrasive salty old sea dog who suffers one of the all time most terrifying and gruesome on-screen deaths I’ve ever seen, it still riles me up and was quite the horrific spectacle on the big screen, it still looks perfectly realistic to these jaded old eyes but I’m not sure what the CGI beguiled younger generations would make of it. Jaws was quite rightly viewed as Spielberg’s calling card and you can see his fin-prints all over the movie, from the family and marriage tensions, the multiple figure framing, the use of the ‘dead’ space in close-ups, the aforementioned structure around set pieces alleviated with character development scenes, and an instinctive skill with music and score to complement the craning and swooping visuals.

In its own modest way Jaws is a masterpiece of its type, a choking horror film with B movie origins that swept the globe and gnawed its way into popular culture, one can only speculate at how many times the opening bars of the soundtrack have been co-opted for comedic purposes for both TV and movie spoofs, but independent of the hype and cultural cache it remains a perfectly pitched and paced movie – and it’s definitely a movie not a film – that deftly sets up its premise, punches the audience buttons of panic and peril, and this new digital print which is soon to be seen on home viewing Blu-Ray with a plethora of documentaries brings to life a forty-year old film that still holds water amongst the ballooning scope and budgets of contemporary audience crowd pleasers, this sure ain’t no small fish in a big pond. So what’s next? Well, we’re staying in the animal kingdom, moving from sharks to spiders, hopefully of the ‘Amazing’ kind…..