Steven Spielberg (1975)

The Towering Inferno was prefaced by a dedication to the firefighters of the world.  Over the course of the next 165 minutes, it showed a few seconds of ordinary-fireman extras tackling the blaze.  Steven Spielberg, along with some critics who admired his previous work, Duel and The Sugarland Express, spout a different order of phony claims about Jaws, the latest disaster-horror movie and the most successful so far.  We’re told the first half can be compared with An Enemy of the People, the second with Moby Dick; the picture as a whole probes our fear of what lies beneath the surface.  Spielberg seems anxious to supply respectable non-commercial reasons for undertaking this amazingly commercial project but he doesn’t need to.  The success of Jaws means that, like Coppola after The Godfather (part one), he’ll be well placed to make the films he personally wants to make.   Jaws is about a giant white shark that terrorises the inhabitants of a small American coastal town whose economy depends on tourists; and the three men in a boat who hunt and kill the shark.   It’s an entertainment in which well-staged and sometimes frightening things happen.  That’s all.  This isn’t to express reservations about the film – it’s just stating a fact.

Jaws broke the American box-office record held by The Godfather in seventy-eight days.  Its extraordinary general release in this country – it opened in York and London on the same day![1]– should guarantee the same kind of success here too.  Although I don’t like the vicarious thrills that disaster films specialise in, Jaws is both more craftsmanlike and more compelling than recent predecessors.  Besides, the interaction between director and audience is, in this case, a genuinely interesting film-going experience.  Many viewers will enter the cinema well informed about what they’re about to see – thanks to the Hollywood publicity machine and/or because they’ve read the Peter Benchley bestseller on which the film is based.  They may also be connoisseurs of civil disaster movies.  Kids watching can feel flattered that the ‘A’ certificate given to Jaws has caused some controversy.  The audience that Hitchcock manipulated in Psycho was relatively unknowing.  When Spielberg presses a button and gets the desired response, many viewers are well aware of what he’s doing – and of what they’re doing, when they exaggerate their terrified reactions to the shocks.

Yet, as plenty of reviews have noted, Spielberg’s direction cleverly prepares us for shocks that often don’t materialise.  As a result, it’s not long before, when they do materialise, they take us by surprise.  I felt almost annoyed at the end of Jaws that I hadn’t jumped once – I envied people who entered into the spirit of the occasion enough to do so[2].   There was a cry of ‘beautiful!’ from near the back of the Odeon as a dismembered leg floated into view.   Applause broke out when the shark was finally blown up.  Plenty of people audibly enjoyed the scenes of mass hysteria on scene – and made the most of their own hysterical reactions.  The discovery of a corpse with a gouged eye and flesh the colour of sharkskin elicited screams that went on for a good ten seconds and started to sound as if it was being deliberately prolonged.

Roy Scheider is the local police chief Brody, a decent professional and family man, and a landlubber.  Richard Dreyfuss is bouncy boffin oceanographer Hooper.  Robert Shaw is grizzled shark-hunter Quint (calling this character Hemingway-esque is more plausible than those invocations of Ibsen and Melville).   Scheider’s achievement shouldn’t be underestimated:  he makes his one-dimensional character two-dimensional.  Dreyfuss is arch early on but settles down into a winning performance.  The comic highlight of the film is the moment when man’s man Quint challengingly crushes a beer can and Hooper counters by crumpling his Styrofoam cup.  Spielberg sensibly leaves Scheider and Dreyfuss to their own devices.  Allowing similar freedom to Robert Shaw, not an unselfish actor, isn’t such a good idea.

The screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb devotes its small portion of character insight to Quint, who explains his bitter struggles with the submarine world with a menacing cackle, a wild eye and even a few sea shanties.  It’s quite satisfying when this wisecracking maverick is eaten by the shark, although the meal takes a long and bloody time.  When, during the hunting expedition, the three men get drunk and start telling jokes, it’s predictable their foe will interrupt them at-this-moment-when-they-least-expect-it:  this isn’t among Spielberg’s most effective shocks.  All three human leads are upstaged by Jaws and no one else counts for much.   Murray Hamilton is the cartoon unscrupulous mayor who will sacrifice lives for the sake of the local tourist trade (the clothes he wears are amusingly tasteless).  Lorraine Gary, as Brody’s wife, wears a swimming costume well and has a good stock of sympathetic, wifely expressions – nothing else is required of her.

The second half of Jaws, though exciting, inevitably lacks the first half’s build-up of tension.  Verna Fields’s editing and the soundtrack – musical and otherwise – are among the biggest strengths.  Perfectly normal sounds are amplified to unnerving effect.  John Williams’s score, though perhaps overpraised, is good fun.   The approaching train-engine noise that heralds the shark’s approach was presumably inspired by Benchley’s likening of the creature to powerful, irresistible machinery.   The film is weakest when it aims for meaningful human drama.  A scene in which the mother of a small boy eaten by Jaws slaps and curses Brody is embarrassingly lifeless.  On the back cover of my copy of Benchley’s book, a press quote enthuses:  ‘Pick up Jaws five minutes before midnight, read the first five pages and I guarantee you’ll be putting it down, breathless and stunned – the final climax is even better than the beginning – as dawn is breaking the next day’.  I concur with the first twenty words.  Spielberg’s truly all-action film is certainly an improvement on what I read of the book.  It’s worth seeing – and not just to find out what all the fuss is about – though the small minority who give it a miss shouldn’t lose sleep over that either.  Russell Davies sums it up well in his Observer review:  Jaws is ‘Superpulp’.

[1976]

[1]  Afternote:  This rarely, if ever, happened back in the 1970s.

[2]  Afternote:  Not to mention one person determined not to get into the spirit of the occasion.  I went to see Jaws in York with a friend – not a frequent filmgoer – who took his seat with assured contempt for what was coming.   He unforgettably jumped about a foot in the air at one of the title character’s unexpected appearances.  JAW (those truly were his initials) was a big bloke.  His levitation and accompanying yelp startled me more than anything on the screen.  Over forty years later, they come to mind at the mention of Jaws.