Panic on the Fourth of July: “Jaws” (1975)

By Scott Ross

Whenever I am asked what my favorite movies are and I name this one, I often feel I have been quizzed about my essential character, and found wanting. I could be a liar, or a snob, and cite a lot of European classics as my favorites, but the fact is that while I have seen a number of great or otherwise good French, Swedish, Italian, German, Japanese and even Czechoslovakian pictures* I don’t enjoy watching movies with subtitles, even on a big theater screen; the distraction of reading dialogue overwhelms my ability to enjoy the images, the rhythms of the movie and the actor’s performances in it, and I never have the sense with subtitles that I have absorbed the picture fully the way I do when I see something in English. Not that I am in favor of dubbing. Who, knowing the inimitable (or imitable) original, would want to see a John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart picture with someone else’s voice on the soundtrack? I couldn’t get through the Visconti The Leopard because the voice I was hearing wasn’t Burt Lancaster’s, one of the most recognizable in the world. I am also, unlike Woody Allen and John Simon (who probably never agreed on anything else), un-persuaded as to the genius of Ingmar Bergman, find Fellini’s excesses a trial and cannot adjust my sense of the ridiculous enough to take Japanese acting seriously. And anyway I hate symbols, which the “serious” filmmakers in Europe apparently discovered sometime around 1945 and would not let go of for years afterward.

My favorite movies are not those by which I hope to impress others with the depths of my discernment and intellectual pretention, but the motion pictures that give me the greatest pleasure to watch — and by “pleasure” I do not necessarily mean happiness. Somehow we have come to conflate entertainment, which can be anything from seeing a 3 Stooges short to reading Thomas Pynchon, with pure escapism. Yet few American movies are more pleasurable or more entertaining as viewing experiences than The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, and neither could remotely be considered escapist. I mean pleasure in the sense of a complete experience, one that satisfies the senses and enriches the soul, even if that enrichment takes the form of well-executed thrills or gut-busting laughter. What is artistically successful does not have to be what one thinks of as High Art; there is more merit in seven-and-a-half minutes of a good Bugs Bunny cartoon than in the entirety of Jackson Pollack. That the titles on my personal list of favorites tend also to be those that were at least nominally popular when they were released speaks not to my taste or acumen alone, but to the collective intelligence of the movie audience of the past. (Although the 1940 Pinocchio, my favorite animated picture, was a disappointment on its release and has never performed as well as the lighter, more comforting Disney features. People who are made uneasy by the movie ought to sit down and read the Collodi original some day.) I never say, and have never said, or written, things like, “Such-and-such is the greatest movie ever made.” What an absurd statement, and a prototypically Western one. Who decides these things? A movie may be the greatest you have ever seen, but that hardly confers an official imprimatur of greatness on it. I couldn’t tell you what I consider the greatest movie I’ve ever seen is. I can only say which are my favorites, and why, and the one thing I am absolutely sure of is that no movie has a lock on the definite article.

^{David Grant and Stephen Grant in The Delicate Art of the Rifle.}

I stopped going to new movies generally, an activity that for years ranked as one of the great and necessary pleasures in life, around the turn of the century and have seen very few since because I got tired of being condescended to and having my intelligence assaulted nearly every time I went to a new release. 1996 was a real bellwether, suggesting just how bad things were becoming: That summer, the three biggest studio blockbusters were Twister, Mission: Impossible and Independence Day, each picture proving more stupid, illogical and insulting than the one before it. It was with a relief bordering on incredulity that summer that I went to a local theater with a friend who had also suffered through those three pieces of steaming offal to see an independent movie, shot largely on the N.C. State University campus in Raleigh. In contrast to the Hollywood pictures of the time which routinely cost $80 – $90 million, The Delicate Art of the Rifle (Screenwriter: Stephen Grant, Director: D.W. Harper), made for $110,00, treated us like adults. It presumed we had brains and could use them, that we might wish to see a well-acted (the appalling John Kessel excepted), intelligently written and directed movie about human beings in conflict with themselves and each other in a story with relevance to the lives of its audience rather than yet another special-effects extravaganza more about explosions and CGI than people. That we could draw for ourselves the parallels with Charles Whitman’s 1966 University of Texas murder-spree (the same figure who inspired a previous independent feature, Peter Bogdanovich’s remarkable debut as a writer-director, the 1968 Targets) and make the requisite moral judgments without being preached at.

As I gradually realized, in the years that followed, that the only time I was being fully entertained at the movies was on those occasions when I attended an old picture in reissue or at a special screening, I knew it was time to give up hoping not only that I would not be disappointed by the next new American movie, but that I would not also be enraged by it. (What Lies Beneath, anyone?) So if you are a part of the popular audience that is encouraging the makers of Barbie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the unnecessary live-action Little Mermaid or Ant-Man and the Wasp to cobble up more garbage, congratulations. You prove my point for me. Audiences across America have become as indifferent, if not downright hostile, to movies about human beings as they are toward any picture exhibiting a degree of wit, taste or intelligence. It astounds me when I reflect that, once upon a not-so-distant time, items like The Apartment, Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate, A Man for All Seasons, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Midnight Cowboy, The Last Picture Show, Klute, Sounder, Cabaret and The Godfather were not only released on a regular basis, and well-regarded critically, they were also popular at the box office.

We are collectively allergic to good movies now, so we no longer get them.

That statement is not the hyperbole it may seem: The ability to write, and direct (and produce) great movies about human beings has to be learned, and once learned, nurtured, or like any muscle not exercised, it atrophies. And I’m afraid this movie, which I love, is part of the reason why it happened that writers and filmmakers lost the knack for it. Or rather, its genuinely phenomenal success, which helped usher in the era we are currently living through. The mega-million dollar success of Jaws, and Star Wars, told the suits, “Screw stories about people. Give ’em thrills and special effects, and make every new movie a lot like some other movie they liked. Better yet: Make sequels! Just re-make the damn things and put in a few differences so the rubes won’t notice how we’re bilking them.” And yet, curiously enough, Jaws is about people, although that was almost by-the-by. Because the mechanical shark was so unreliable, the narrative shifted from “let’s-see-the-Great-White-bite-people-in-half” to “Let’s not see the Great White, and focus on how the characters behave around this thing no one can see.” Relationships in Jaws are why it’s such an effective thriller: Between the Amity Island Police Chief Martin Brody and his wife Ellen, between the Brodies and their children, between Brody and the mayor, between Brody and the people he is pledged to serve and protect, between Brody and the oceanographer Matt Hooper, between Hooper and the shark-hunter Quint, and between Brody and Quint. If the picture had been made today instead of nearly 50 years ago, the shark would be a CGI effect, the characters cardboard archetypes and there would be none of those tasty moments between people, just a lot of gore and sour wisecracks. It’s not just that the established names found their craft altered but that those who followed, the younger generations of movie writers and directors, never learned. They got used to the debased quality of the pictures on offer, and emulate it. In another 20 years their successors will have figured out how to eliminate human characters from movies entirely.

^{“Martin, it’s all psychological. You yell, ‘Barracuda,’ everybody says, ‘Huh? What?’ You yell, ‘Shark’… we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”}

In 1975, the year Jaws was released, among the highest-grossing movies of the year (including bleed-overs from the winter of 1974) were The Godfather Part II, Murder on the Orient Express, Young Frankenstein, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Shampoo and The Return of the Pink Panther, with Love and Death, Three Days of the Condor and Dog Day Afternoon to follow in the autumn. Not perhaps, with the exceptions of Godfather II, Dog Day and the flawed Alice, the greatest aggregation of human dramas, although the comic Shampoo is more fully human than anything on offer at the googolplexes of America in the 21st century. The film year as a whole, while not as high a period for movies as 1971-1972, included Galileo (part of the second and final American Film Theater subscription series), Report to the Commissioner, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (AFT), At Long Last Love (much better than its reputation would suggest), The Great Waldo Pepper, Lemmon and Bancroft in The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Rancho Deluxe, In Celebration (AFT), Tommy, The Yakuza, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Seven Beauties, the almost-great The Day of the Locust, End of the Game, The Man in the Glass Booth (AFT), the underrated French Connection II, The Wind and the Lion, Nashville, Night Moves, the criminally under-seen Richard Brooks Western Bite the Bullet, Cooley High, Rollerball, Smile, The Wilby Conspiracy, Mitchum as Philip Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (a flop until some genius started programming it as a late-show), 92 in the Shade, James Whitmore in Give ’em Hell Harry, the wonderful Hearts of the West, the very funny “Flashman” entry Royal Flash, Hester Street, Take a Hard Ride, Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys (which re-ignited George Burns’ career), the Harlan Ellison adaptation A Boy and His Dog, the overrated but dramatically effective One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Gene Wilder’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, Barry Lyndon, John Huston’s splendid The Man Who Would Be King, the Bob Clampett-produced pre-1948 Looney Tunes compilation Bugs Bunny Superstar, The Killer Elite (Sam Peckinpaw out of Marc Norman and Stirling Silliphant), Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H., the surprisingly entertaining Charles Bronson entry Breakheart Pass, the interesting misfire The Hindenburg and a reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The quality of the list is highly variable, but when was the last time this century a run of movies in a single 12-month period was that good? Nashville alone would have made 1975 a movie year to remember.

I am suggesting that Jaws was part of a popular film culture that was very healthy — far healthier than it has been since the early 1980s. The picture’s eventual financial success proved un-healthy, for personal filmmaking, but I don’t see how that can be retrospectively blamed on the people who made it. For the 14-year old moviegoer who was me, who had seen an advance poster for Jaws (and possibly that trailer so memorably narrated by Percy Rodrigues, although I no longer remember when I first saw it) and who picked up a copy of the bestselling Peter Benchley paperback in anticipation, the movie was the most nerve-wracking thing he’d seen to that time. It was also funny, cannily observed, superbly acted, wonderfully scored, beautifully made, and even at that age I knew it was almost infinitely superior to its poorly-written source. The book, a true pot-boiler if ever there was one, deflated me a bit; the movie exhilarated me. It sent me out on a high. When I see it again, it still does.

Perhaps one reason eyebrows go up when I mention Jaws as a favorite movie, along with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is that both were directed by Steven Spielberg. Most of the intelligent, film-savvy people I have known as an adult loathe Spielberg, arguing against him as a manipulative, sentiment-wallowing schlockmeister, a judgment with which I largely agree. Indeed, I would also accuse him, latterly, as being either cynical or a political naif led into appalling historical revisionism on film by his best friend, the CIA asset Tom Hanks, who seems intent on re-writing recent American history to reflect the world-view of Allan Dulles. (Hanks’ official standing as Hollywood’s Mr. Nice Guy is, to use an espionage term he might appreciate, good cover.) I would add to Spielberg’s list of cinematic sins the establishment during the 1980s of a movie factory dedicated to recycling Baby-Boom TV Generation memories and the production of processed shit in attractive — and expensive — cans. (His friend and frequent collaborator George Lucas was even guiltier in this respect.) That of course concerns Spielberg’s crimes against aesthetics, minor indeed compared to his much greater crime of being at least partly responsible for the horrific deaths of Vic Morrow and two young Vietnamese children during the filming of The Twilight Zone in 1983 and for which both he and John Landis essentially got away with three staggeringly insensitive acts of manslaughter.† Landis caught the brunt of the press and public umbrage, but Little Stevie, who behaved self-servingly throughout the aftermath of the incident and Landis’ trial and who quickly severed his friendship and his professional relationship with his fellow director, somehow escaped being tarred.

Inasmuch as I generally hate the excuses made for popular artists to justify our ignoring the appalling things they do (“Yes, we know he raped a 13-year-old girl. But he made Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby!” Sotto voce: “Plus, you know, his wife was murdered…“) I would say that Spielberg’s work on Jaws (and Close Encounters) justifies itself. With the lone exception of the severed leg falling to the sandy floor of the estuary, which feels excessive to me, there’s scarcely a frame in Jaws I would eliminate, and the only regret I feel about its artistic (as opposed to its financial) success is that Great White Sharks were misunderstood for so long after the picture was released, and even that is as much Peter Benchley’s fault as Steven Spielberg’s; Benchley (the son of Nathaniel and grandson of Robert) rightly felt responsible for the shark slaughters that followed, although the terrible 1916 Jersey Shore attacks that partly inspired his book were certainly real enough. As illogical as the behavior of Benchley’s (and Spielberg’s) shark seems in Jaws, the actions of that 1916 Great White, and in fresh water, were nearly as implausible. Sharks, generally speaking, do not like the taste of humans. It’s why so many attacks are not fatal. They mistake us for their natural prey; they’re testing the meat and, finding it wanting after a bite or two, usually go away. That the shark in Jaws behaves with malevolence, that it deliberately goes after the men on the Orca, is where Spielberg and Benchley indulge in sheer fantasy. But by that time, we’re so caught up in the story we barely notice.

---

^{Martha’s Vineyard: Brown, Spielberg, Zanuck.}

Enough ink has been spilled, and more than enough video hours expended, on the filming of Jaws that I see little need to rehearse it here at any length. In brief: a) Steven Spielberg, who had made the impressive Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown production Sugarland Express, read the Benchley novel, which the producers had optioned and which he saw on Brown’s desk, and wanted to film it; b) Zanuck, who felt that Spielberg was a major young talent, wanted him to make his next picture for them, and gave Jaws to him; c) Benchley wrote the original draft screenplay which, unsatisfactory to just about everyone, was extensively revised by Spielberg; d) The playwright Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope) was engaged to revise Spielberg’s revision, eschewing screen credit; e) The improvisatory comic Carl Gottlieb, hired to play the Amity Island newspaper publisher in the picture was retained to revise everyone’s revisions on a day-to-day basis as the Martha’s Vineyard shoot grew longer (and his acting role became correspondingly smaller); f) Because the mechanical Great White did not function well in salt water, and proved underwhelming when it did, Spielberg & Co. worked around it, slowly realizing as Verna Fields began assembling their footage, that it was more effective the less the shark was seen; g) Thanks to the many delays occasioned by location weather and an unreliable shark, more time was spent by Spielberg and Gottlieb on the script and by the actors (Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton) in improvising their roles, expanding them beyond their slender outlines, enriching them and deepening and clarifying the characters’ relationships to each other. The shooting of Jaws was thus a confluence of events and delays no one foresaw and which placed the people involved in a unique position — they turned adversity to their advantage, and ended up with a richer, funnier “scare” movie than they could ever have imagined.

While it’s certainly true that the then-recently-named “disaster movie,” thought to have begun with Universal’s Airport in 1970, was (at least for a time) an almost guaranteed cash-cow for the studios: Irwin Allen brought out The Poseidon Adventure in 1972 and The Towering Inferno in 1974, and Universal, along with Airport 1975 in October, had Earthquake in the theaters at the same time Inferno was tearing (burning?) up the box-office. For some ticket-buyers, Jaws was merely another entry in the cycle, and enjoyed on that level. For others it was a shock-picture — a horror movie in which the horror, as in Psycho, was natural instead of supernatural, and (as with Norman Bates) unrevealed until well into the action. For some it was a thriller, for others a pitch-black comedy. For many of us, I suspect, it was all of these at once, and that too was unique. Big popular movies in the 1970s were often genre pictures of one type or another: The disaster movie, the comedy (What’s Up, Doc?, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, The Return of the Pink Panther, The Pink Panther Strikes Again), the romance (Love Story, Summer of ’42, The Way We Were), the war movie (Patton) the Western (Rio Lobo, Big Jake) the buddy movie (Uptown Saturday Night, The Sting), the caper (Smokey and the Bandit), the crime thriller (The French Connection) and the horror picture (The Omen, The Excorcist, although its writer-producer would have called it a serious religious parable). Genre stayed in its genre; the lines were seldom blurred as Jaws blurred them, and I can think of no major studio release of the time that so effectively parodied, as Spielberg, Gottlieb and their actors do, the extremes of machismo. As Pauline Kael noted in her contemporary review:

“When the three protagonists are in their tiny boat, trying to find the shark that has been devouring people, you feel that Robert Shaw, the malevolent old shark hunter, is so manly that he wants to get them all killed; he’s so manly he’s homicidal… The director, Steven Spielberg, sets up bare-chested heroism as a joke and scores off it all through the movie… the fool on board isn’t the chief of police, or the bookman, either. It’s Shaw, the obsessively masculine fisherman, who thinks he’s got to prove himself by fighting the shark practically single-handed. The high point of the film’s humor is in our seeing Shaw get it; this nut Ahab, with his hypermasculine basso-profundo speeches, stands in for all the men who have to show they’re tougher than anybody. The shark’s cavernous jaws demonstrate how little his toughness finally adds up to.”

Both Shaw as Quint and Dreyfuss as the ichthyologist Hooper are made fun of by the filmmakers; only Scheider’s island police chief Brody stands apart from the pair’s constant need for one-upsmanship. Hooper, young, rich and intellectual, is instantly threatened by Quint while the sharking boat Orca‘s skipper despises Hooper for his social and educational status. Brody alone is unaffected by these extremes; when Quint and Hooper compare bodily scars, there’s a moment where Martin lifts his shirt briefly, looks at his belly and then thinks better of it — and we suddenly like an already appealing character even more for his refusal to play silly, 8th-grade level macho games. (In the novel, Brody is the sole survivor of the trio, but that seems as much a matter of literary punishment as anything else since Benchley’s Hooper, unlike Dreyfuss conventionally WASP-blond and handsome, has it off with Mrs. Brody and the Chief suspects it. This lovemaking event is arguably the worst chapter in a very bad book. Of all the changes to the material made by the filmmakers, this was the omission that pleased and relieved me the most at 14.)

^{Beer can, plastic cup: 8th grade-level macho games.}

Where I disagree with Kael’s assessment above is in the matter of Quint’s death, about which I can find nothing remotely humorous unless you like your black-comedy so dark it spills over into snuff porn. There is irony in what happens to Quint, certainly, but not, for almost anyone other than Kael (and, perhaps, the psychopaths in the audience), humor. I strongly suspect it was Quint’s genuinely grisly death, and Shaw’s horrific screams of agony and terror, that led to the first line ever added to an MPAA ratings block for a specific movie: In addition to “Parental Guidance Suggested” and “Some Material May Not Be Suitable for Pre-Teenagers” was added, on an adjacent part of the poster advertising, the phrase “MAY BE TOO INTENSE FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN.” Nine years later, the gruesome content of two Spielberg-associated pictures — Gremlins, which he produced and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which he directed for Lucas — led to the first ratings addition since 1968 and the first rating change since GP became PG in 1972: The adoption of “PG-13.” So much for the cuddly, kid-friendly, latter-day Spielberg.

That Quint’s death is so disturbing, even to us Jaws fanatics, is due in large part to Shaw’s all too realistic screams but in larger part to the style of Spielberg’s direction — to the documentary realism with which he and Bill Butler, his extraordinary cinematographer, shot the picture. Most of the action in the movie is seen in this way, from opening to ending. Readers of these pages will know that I am the furthest thing from an adherent of la politique des auteurs, but along with the contributions of the actors, and Spielberg’s constant collaboration with Carl Gottlieb on the script, on and off the set, Jaws is pretty obviously a director’s picture, as Sugarland Express was and as the made-for-television Duel was, even given its taut Richard Matheson teleplay. The style in all three is nearly identical (although Sugarland is rather more stylized); they, and Close Encounters, bear Spielberg’s youthful stamp — his nearly unerring eye for the look of things. That documentarian style is one of the reasons Jaws packs such a wallop, as Duel did: The endless miles of desert macadam, the weathered look of the diners and gas stations and roadside attractions, gave the irrationally homicidal behavior of the unseen semi truck driver intent on killing Dennis Weaver a frame of numbing mundanity, and made him seem even more inexplicable, and scarier.

By concentrating on the minute details of daily life on a small island off the eastern coast and ticking off its prosaic concerns (karate class kids destroying a picket fence, a minor domestic injury, the new police chief trying to fit in as a transplanted off-islander) the filmmaker insures that the attacks by the shark — unseen, like the semi driver but, unlike him, not planned that way by screenwriters or director — make an even greater impact on the viewer. Only rarely do what I think of as “director’s tricks” signal something else, namely Spielberg creating a photographic effect. I’m thinking of the numerous moments shot through glass (how the Orca is seen between the bleached jaws in Quint’s picture-window as it moves out of port, or the way the book on sharks Brody is reading gets reflected in Scheider’s teardrop-shaped spectacles and how he is seen through the Orca‘s cabin glass as he enjoys the chase after the Great White) or the simultaneous zoom forward/dolly back effect out of Vertigo when the young boy is devoured, or Quint’s machete seen against still waters, which feels like a symbol or a metaphor, but I’ll be damned if I know of what. The throwing down of a gauntlet, most likely. (There is an interesting parallel between Spielberg shooting through glass in Jaws and Roman Polanski doing the same thing a year earlier with reflective surfaces in Chinatown, and I assume the younger director was influenced by that motif.)

The assurance with which a then 28-year-old filmmaker with only a single theatrical feature under his belt and who was battling an unreliable special effect and the vicissitudes of shooting for long periods on the water approached this material is remarkable, and reminds one of another famed movie wunderkind making his first feature at 26. I’m not suggesting that Jaws is as stylistically challenging, as thematically daring, as dramaturgically rich or as cinematically influential as Citizen Kane; Kane is a statement, and Jaws, after all, is just a highly entertaining studio-produced thriller. But the youthful energy, the go-for-broke quality of a young man with a lot of creative ideas and who knows he’s got something very interesting by the tail, is the same in Spielberg as in Welles. The elation both unleashed in their audiences is similar too.

Take that Vertigo effect, known as a dolly zoom. As Hitchcock developed and used it, the zoom/dolly (simultaneous dolly back and zoom forward) has always left me cold. It feels entirely studied — show-offy in an almost Scorsesean manner. (If you perform a Google search on the phrase you’ll see endless, panting if not orgasmic, appraisals. Thus has a reflexive love of camera angles and cutting superseded such old-fogeyish concerns as story and character.) It’s a nice idea, I suppose, but it doesn’t really approximate the queasy disorientation one feels with vertigo, and it tells us nothing about James Stewart’s character, or what he’s feeling, which would have been better expressed in a close-up on the actor, not on an alley or a steep bell-tower staircase. But Hitchcock at his show-off worst is about effects more than people; the same technique, in Jaws, illuminates character, because the camera is focused, not on objects but on a human being in turmoil. And the build-up to that moment is remarkable — the sort of thing audiences now take for granted but which was decidedly not the norm in 1975.

Following the discovery of what seems to him — correctly, as it turns out — evidence of a fatal shark attack, Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody is sitting high on the beach, watching anxiously for any signs of trouble. (As well as giving him a choice view of the ocean as the swimmers congregate his position also indicates both how much he hates the water, and how isolated he is within his dilemma.) The set-up to the boy’s death is perfect, and shows how, again, the emphasis on the quotidian gives its opposite even greater impact. There’s no music in the sequence, for one thing, or at least not until just before young Alex Kintner is attacked, so we are not only unprepared for the shock, we are lulled into a kind of voyeuristic complacency even as our fears are heightened by the repeated teases Spielberg (and Verna Fields, his editor) throw our way and which act on Brody like an emotional pressure-cooker.

1. An enormously fat woman (Jean Canha) walks down the beach to the shore while at water’s edge a young man throws a stick into the ocean for his black lab Pippet to fetch.‡
2. Emerging from the water, Alex (Jeffrey Voorhees) asks his mother (Lee Fierro) if he can get his raft and stay in just a little longer.
3. The camera pans up with Alex to where Brody sits looking out to sea in concern while his wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary) chats with another couple, the Tafts (Fritzi Jane Courtney and Phil Murray).
4. There is a cut (#1) back to the boy throwing the stick again and Pippet giving chase into the waves, where he briefly disturbs a young couple.
5. Another cut (#2) as Alex runs past his mother down to the shore with his raft and climbs aboard as it floats out.
6. A third cut, to the dog paddling toward shore with the stick in his mouth and intercepted by a young male swimmer.
7. Cut #4: The fat woman, serenely floating on her back.
8. Cut #5: Alex paddling the raft toward shore.
9. Cut #6: The young man wrestling Pippet for the stick and throwing it out again as the dog lopes into the water.
10. Cut #7: To Brody, watching all of this activity from high up on the beach.

It’s here that Spielberg and Fields engage in the movie’s first break with the documentary realism that has governed it from the beginning: An indistinct body walks by left to right in front of Brody, and once it’s passed, he’s closer to us. (Cut #8.) Another walker passes, and Brody is closer still, and larger. (Cut #9.) If this was a stylistic insertion merely, the cuts would be clever but intrusive. Each time this happens the new cut (which seems almost like a wipe dissolve but isn’t) represents another way in which Brody is thwarted. He’d wanted (and expected) to close the beaches after the first fatality and been vetoed by the Rotary-type mayor of Amity (Murray Hamilton); now, reduced to impotently observing from the sand, even that attempt at safeguarding the public is reduced, by the strolling figures obscuring his view of the water.

Cut #10: The fat woman floating. Another body moves across Brody’s field of vision, and after this wipe-like cut (#11), he’s further away from the camera again, Ellen sunning herself on the extreme left of the screen.
Cut #12: Yet another stroller walks in front of Brody, and when the cut is over we see, from Brody’s point of view, a dark shape moving through the water behind the fat woman.
Cut #13: Another wipe, and we see Brody sitting up in alarm.
Cut #14: Brody’s P.O.V.: Harry (Wally Hooper Jr.), an elderly male swimmer in a black bathing cap who has just swum under the fat woman, his head surfacing as he exhales.
Cut #15: The final wipe-like cut. Brody looks at first relieved, then annoyed and finally, disgusted.
Cut #16: The male half of the Tafts walks over to ask the police chief to do him a municipal favor. Brody’s view of the ocean is blocked once more.
Cut #17: The top of Brody’s head from just above the eyes is seen over Mr. Taft’s shoulder, as Brody raises his head up to look over him.
Cut #18: The ocean, seen in a reverse-angle shot from Brody’s P.O.V., the young female half of the couple we noticed previously seen over the man’s shoulder. She screams and disappears from view beneath the water.
Cut #19: Brody’s face as he stands, his anxious eyes on the water.
Cut #20: The girl rising up, on her boyfriend’s shoulders now as he emerges from the water.
Cut #21: Taft and Brody, at opposite sides of the screen. The man has been prating on this entire time, wholly oblivious either to what’s happening, or to the police chief’s distracted state. Scheider’s head is out of the frame; it returns as he lowers himself back down from his standing position.

I won’t belabor this shot-by-shot description any longer. I simply wished to indicate how expertly the sequence has been put together, our own anxieties at ebb or neap tide depending on what Martin Brody sees and hears on the beach, and how he reacts. It’s notable too that there has been no “shark music” on the soundtrack during this sequence. Only once does John Williams not signal when the Great White is around: That famous moment of shock when Brody sees the shark off the Orca’s bow for the first time, before murmuring to Quint his now almost universally remembered line (ad-libbed by Scheider in rehearsal) “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Otherwise, as with the death of the young female swimmer at the start, Williams alerts us to the animal’s presence, as he will do here, just before poor Alex Kintner is devoured.§

When he is, the attack is shot in several ways: First, from below (as was the case with Crissie, the first victim), from the Great White’s P.O.V. moving upward, toward the boy’s kicking legs; from the beach, where the attack happens so fast we are, initially, as uncertain of what we’re seeing as the those on the shore; from Brody’s perspective; and, finally, from below again as Alex is pulled down into the depths. Although we do for a brief moment see young Jeffrey Voorhees rise up in a gush of blood, his torso and arm visible, and that’s terrible enough, a deleted scene using a rubber model apparently showed Alex’s death in horrific detail. And again, the snippets of film leading directly up to the sequence are of commonplace occurrences: A group of young boys running into the water, squealing as children do in groups; Harry telling Brody, “We know all about you, Chief. You don’t go in the water at all, do you?” and getting insulted when Brody answers, referring to his bathing-cap, “That’s some bad hat, Harry” (which plays off the police chief’s disgust at the old man for scaring him before) and walking off in high dudgeon; Ellen going behind the Chief, telling him he is uptight (there’s the understatement of the year) and massaging his shoulders; the Brody’s little son Sean (Jay Mello) playing in the sand and singing “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” Just down the beach from Sean, however, an ominous note is sounded: Pippet’s owner is calling for him, and getting no response. Spielberg and Fields cut to a piece of wood floating in the water, and our stomachs sink. Before we have time to more than make note of this, however (and if we did we might question how an animal of that size could be fatally attacked without making a sound or leaving a trace of blood) the boys in the water are seen from below, accompanied by the Stravinskiesque shark theme. The camera, which at that moment has become the Great White’s eyes, surveys the swimmers’ legs briefly, swings slowly to the left and zeroes in on Alex Kintner’s, kicking from the edge of his raft.

At this point things happen very quickly. The camera continues moving upward, fast, and we either hold our collective breath or want to scream at the boy to pull in his feet. The Vertigo effect follows the shot of Alex, also seen from below, being pulled into the depths, his screams choked off by the water presumably rushing into his lungs. The next cut is to Brody, staring, his eyes widening, his body beginning to move. The emotions we feel at seeing, however obliquely, a child killed in a brutal, bloody manner are magnified at that moment by the sudden sliding string note (what is known in the movie business as a sting) on the soundtrack as the camera simultaneously zooms in and dollies back. The Hitchcock move isolates Brody even further, and emphasizes his own shock and horror. And although it, or the shots in Vertigo if you prefer, have been imitated many times the only other, genuinely effective use of the technique I’ve encountered in a movie apart from Jaws is in another Spielberg (or at least, officially Spielberg-produced) picture, Poltergeist, where it becomes a supernatural optical illusion thrown up to keep a mother from rescuing her imperiled children. (When Scorsese employed it later, pointlessly, for GoodFellas, it served no dramatic or emotional purpose. To borrow a phrase from Eliot M. Camarena, it was just another of Little Marty’s ostentatious “Looka-me!” shots.) The emotional capper of the sequence, of course, is achingly human: The heart-clamp of Mrs. Kintner vainly searching for her son and calling his name. And all of this takes place in a little over four-and-a-half minutes of well-shot and artfully manipulated images. The first great sequence in Jaws begins barely 13 minutes into its 2 hour-and 4-minute running time.

_{Apologies for the insensitive video title. It wasn’t mine.}

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For the fan of Jaws, watching it again is a bit like listening to a favorite band or singer’s “greatest hits” album. Every scene and sequence has something to recommend it, but we who are familiar with the picture are thinking ahead to this favorite scene or that: The “pier incident”; the “bigger boat” scene; the first barrel chase; the U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue; the “Smile, you sonofabitch!” climax. Yet some of the picture’s smaller moments are among its most keenly observed. In addition to the lovely bit in which little Jay Mello imitates Roy Scheider, charmingly played and sweetly scored by Williams and caught almost on the fly by the director and the gut-wrenching scene that precedes (and generates) it, in which Mrs. Kintner publicly slaps Brody for not closing the beaches are little tidbits and performances scattered throughout the movie that stay with you, or at any rate, stay with me.

Mrs. Kintner’s confrontation with Brody on the dock, filmed with beautiful understatement by Steven Spielberg, is at the emotional heart of the picture, and the most moving scene in it. (It’s also one of the reasons I find many of the current smart-ass references to Alex Kintner offensive. Who jokes about children being violently killed, except on “South Park”?) Lee Fierro’s simplicity and directness, the way she holds on to her soft-spoken dignity, her voice breaking only slightly as she pours out her grief and outrage, is a small model of effective acting. She turns a moment, and a role, that court cliché into a quiet little powerhouse. You may forget a lot of things, in any number of movies, but you never forget her.

Speaking of the indelible: Everyone remembers and loves Craig Kingsbury as Ben Gardner, justifiably, but how about the marvelous Peggy Scott as Polly, Chief Brody’s formidable looking yet sweet-voiced secretary? How about Fritzi Jane Courtney as the motel owner Mrs. Taft, who assures Ellen she’ll never be an islander and whose response to a tasteless jest at the town meeting (“I don’t think that’s funny at all, I’m sorry”) is cherishable, not for what she says but the inimitable way she says it?

Lorraine Gary, whose casting as Ellen Brody may have been seen as a matter of nepotism (she was the wife of Sid Sheinberg, the President and CEO of Universal, which financed and released the movie) is a wonderful presence in Jaws, and the focal figure in what is, I think, my favorite moment in the picture, one no one to my knowledge has ever commented on but which, again, points to the movie’s very human grounding. (I couldn’t find an image of it online either.) It’s at Quint’s shack, as Martin is preparing to leave on the Orca with the captain and Hooper. As the young ichthyologist’s gear is brought on board, Quint keeps up a running commentary on everything (this is where Shaw sings “Spanish Ladies,” which becomes one of the motifs in John Williams’ score). When he sees Ellen with Martin, his remarks take on a deliberately crude, sexual tone, meant to humiliate both husband and wife, and particularly to emasculate Martin for Ellen’s having to hear it. The couple ignores the bully, but he inhibits their farewell, making them approach it slantwise, although they both know Martin may never return. When Martin goes aboard Ellen, driven to the limits of her endurance by her emotions and by Quint’s cruel taunting, starts to walk in the opposite direction and the camera pans with her as the walk becomes a trot, then a run as, hands up before her as if to ward off an evil spirit (which Quint at that moment seems to embody) she rushes from the place like the Hounds of Hell are at her heels. It’s one of the most memorable (non-lethal) exits from a movie any actress has ever had.

Many Jaws fans mis-remember the movie’s initial revelation of the un-seen shark. The moment the Great White’s head breaks the surface of the water off the Orca‘s bow and gives the chum-ladling Chief Brody such a start is so strong, so funny, and so well shot and edited, we may forget we’ve actually seen the shark already. It’s during the “estuary” scene, when the Scout leader (Ted Grossman) and three boys, including Chris Rebello as the Brodys’ young son Michael, are swamped by the Great White, their respective boats overturned in the pond. As Grossman reaches for his red canoe the shark is seen below the water, rising diagonally, its jaws closing around one of the man’s legs.¶ The filmmakers cut to a view from the shore as Grossman screams in pain and terror, then back as the Great White grabs his right arm, pulling him down below the surface. This is not only our first glimpse of the shark, beyond fins slicing through the waves, as at the beginning of this sequence, it’s also the first time we in the audience understand what Hooper knows and the mayor refuses to think about: That the thing is enormous, frighteningly huge. (A longer, bloodier scene was filmed and, like Alex Kintner’s gruesome death, mercifully cut.) Brody doesn’t see the shark, however; nor does anyone else who isn’t in the water, and even the survivors don’t see it clearly. The most those on shore can glimpse of it, as with the young painter by the estuary who spots it first, are its dorsal and anal fins before it dips completely below the water; that moment is wonderfully framed, with little Jay Mello building sand castles in the foreground, his back to the water, completely oblivious of the real-life monster haunting his vicinity.

I have not really begun to cite the sequences in Jaws that make it such an accomplished entertainment: The nocturnal search for the Great White in Hooper’s yacht and his encounter with Ben Gardner’s pop-eyed head; the initial confrontation between Brody and the Mayor on the ferry, beautifully captured by Spielberg in one static shot lasting a full minute and-a-half; the town meeting and Quint’s memorable entrance into the picture (he would use fingernails on a chalkboard, wouldn’t he?); the attempt by two Islanders to hook the shark with a raw pot-roast during which they are unpleasantly surprised by their unseen quarry and which is both scarifying and funny; the invasions from the mainland, first by tourists and then by an anarchic Armada of mercenary idiots who will, as Hooper says, be lucky to get out of the harbor alive; the July 4th sequence, ending with exactly the panic the Mayor predicted; the first, inconclusive, “barrel chase” on the Orca; Quint’s U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue, tossed off by Sackler in a few sentences, “polished” by John Milius to an eventual nine pages and edited by Shaw to a more manageable, and compelling three-and-a-half minutes**; the second encounter with the Great White, when things go from bad to worse and which more or less comprises the last third of the picture; the cunning manner with which Spielberg and Fields comingle their controlled underwater shots with the hair-raising footage by Ron and Valerie Taylor of a real Great White struggling to escape the cage with which it has gotten entangled. Nor have I mentioned how cannily the filmmakers, plagued by mechanical problems, turned a disadvantage into mystery for the audience, particularly in the opening sequence, when our not seeing what is attacking Susan Backlinie in the dark waters makes what is happening to her even more terrifying. For that matter I haven’t begun to discuss the superb sound effects by John R. Carter and Robert Hoyt, or the splendid variegation of John Williams’ score (and Herbert W. Spencer’s orchestration of it) nor how fine the trio of over-the-title leads is.

In common with very few pictures, there isn’t a scene in Jaws that feels out of place, or superfluous, or which goes on too long, or indeed too briefly. The craftsmanship extends to every department, very much including poor Russell Mattey, who designed the shark and who comes in for much opprobrium for it not working as well in Massachusetts as it had in L.A. Orson Welles famously defined a movie director as a man who presides over accidents: “They’re the only things that keep a film from being dead.” Jaws, a movie much concerned with death, and beset by accident, vibrates with life.

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*Off the top of my head: La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game), La Grande Illusion, Les Enfants du Parais, La Belle et la Bête, Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), Special Section, La Cage aux Folles, Shoah, Au Revoir Les Enfants, the Gérard Depardieu Cyrano de Bergerac, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, Man on the Roof, parts of Scenes from a Marriage, Twist and Shout, Pelle the Conqueror, Otto E Mezzo (8 1⁄2), The Battle of Algiers, La Conformista, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Amarcord, A Special Day, Allegro non tropo, Cinema Paradiso, Der Blau Angel, M, Die Marquise von O (The Marquise of O), Das Boot, The Nasty Girl, Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, and Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Watched Trains). I suppose Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti Westerns” also qualify, although I have only ever seen their English-language versions (again: why would I want to hear some Italian’s voice coming out of Clint Eastwood’s mouth?) and none, alas, in a theater.

†See Stephen Farber and Marc Green, Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego and the Twilight Zone Case, 1988.

‡I suppose I am being abusive (isn’t that the word your algorithm tarred with me, Zuckerberg?) saying an enormously fat woman is, in fact, enormously fat. Today she would no doubt be described by the deluded of the so-called body positivity movement (comprised almost entirely of morbidly obese women, as overweight men are not allowed in, or even acknowledged) as full-figured, healthy and beautiful.

§Williams and Spielberg do cheat a bit by using the shark motif when Hooper finds the tooth in Ben Gardner’s hull, but if you understand billing at all you know the filmmakers weren’t about to kill off Richard Dreyfuss that early in the picture. The music subliminally primes us for a scare, and Gardner’s head popping out provides the shock.

¶There’s a continuity error here, one of the few in Jaws: When Grossman falls out of the boat, he’s barefoot. When his severed leg is seen falling to the sandy bottom it’s wearing a sneaker.

**Pauline Kael objected, understandably, to this, wondering why no one involved considered the feelings of the dead men’s survivors, yet some of them expressed gratitude for finally understanding what had happened to their loved ones.

Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross