Remembering ‘Jaws,’ the 1970s movie that helped kill the 1970s movie
Film’s rich, deep understanding of humanity and its infinite complexities makes it so enduring
Beach-goers run from the water in a scene from the 1975 release of Jaws.
By Nathan Rabin, Special to Boston.com
Writers love to divide history into eras with clear beginnings, but cultural movements are seldom that tidy and neat. According to conventional wisdom, for example,1975’s Jaws is the movie that conclusively launched the summer blockbuster season and helped end the auteur-driven late- 1960s/1970s golden age that kicked off with the twin assaults to propriety that were Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider.
In the decades to come, summer movies would be associated with mindless spectacle rather than characterization. In that respect, Star Wars or Raiders Of The Lost Ark would have been more appropriate films to kick off the summer blockbuster season, because they are proudly old-fashioned exercises in popcorn escapism that served as blueprints for many of the hit franchises that followed.
From the vantage point of today, however, Jaws doesn’t seem like a movie that broke with the naturalism and character-based filmmaking of the late-60s/70s in favor of unapologetic commercialism. Instead, it looks like a film that perfectly fused the sensibility of young Hollywood with its twenty-something director’s already-remarkable gift for anticipating the needs of a mass audience. For a film widely credited with helping kill off the quirky new Hollywood of the 1970s, Jaws feels unmistakably like an example of the kind of substantive fare whose heyday it ostensibly helped end.
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Photos: Behind the scenes of Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard
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If Robert Altman directed a thriller of Hitchcockian mastery, there’s a good chance it would look and feel a lot like Jaws. Though history would simplify it into a thriller about a killer shark, the film works splendidly in its first two acts as a complex, multi-layered and exquisitely acted comedy-drama about a community in crisis and three very different men called upon to end the threat and restore calm to the tourist haven of Amity Island: pragmatic police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), man of science Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and man of action Quint (Robert Shaw).
Like Altman, Spielberg worked extensively with his cast to develop characters and create dialogue. He was more interested in forming a partnership with his actors than in telling them what to do. Baby genius Spielberg famously transformed obstacles that would have sunk lesser filmmakers into strengths. The script went through countless permutations after Jaws author Peter Benchley turned in a disappointing early draft. But the lack of a strong, final script encouraged actors to make the characters their own, and inspired some of the film’s most beloved moments, like Brody’s ad-libbed line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’’
When the mechanical shark didn’t work, Spielberg decided to rely on inference to suggest horrors far beyond what he could actually show. As a consummate student of film, Spielberg knew that what happened in the audience’s mind when they imagined the brutality of his emotionless, predatory villain was more terrifying than anything that could be shown onscreen.
For much of the filming, Spielberg didn’t have a functioning, convincing shark to work with, so he made a film that was fundamentally about people. Spielberg understood that the threat posed by the shark would mean more if audiences were deeply invested in the men the shark ferociously hunted.
It would be a mistake to call Jaws underrated, since it is widely, rightly regarded as one of the greatest thrillers of all time. But as is often the case with entertainment that transcends its origins to become a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon, its full complexity and depth has been reduced over time to its most recognizable elements. When people think about Jaws they tend to think less of its intelligence than about the breathtaking set-piece of the frolicking swimmer being taken down by a black-eyed monster of the deep, the shrieking horn of doom on John Williams’ score, and the deadpan understatement with which police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) delivers the “bigger boat’’ line.
Jaws’ bifurcated reputation is also probably affected by four decades of sequels, knock-offs and spoofs. None shared the original’s oft-overlooked concern for characterization and nuance, but many had giant monsters (a much easier quality to rip off than quality or craftsmanship). If Jaws is lumped in with the lesser, simpler films it helped inspire, that’s partially because it undeniably led to abominations like 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge.
Jaws became iconic and massively influential due to that pesky shark and the riveting hunt that takes up its third act. But it is the film’s rich, deep understanding of humanity and its infinite complexities that makes it so enduring.
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