Movie Review: Jaws (1975)
What can I say about Jaws that hasn’t already been said? It’s an absolute masterpiece of filmmaking, and helped launch the career of one of the greatest and certainly one of the most successful Hollywood directors of all time in Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg here takes a schlocky monster-movie type premise and elevates it with great filmmaking. You can compare it to Halloween in how John Carpenter’s taut filmmaking elevated that above all slasher movies and exploitation movies that were inspired by it, but I think the best comparison is probably Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. In both movies, we have people who happen to be my two favorite directors, taking a cheesy b-movie plot, and make them genuinely terrifying with clever filmmaking techniques, and likable characters.
Spielberg does a really great job with the characters and the setting here. Amity Island feels like a real place, and we get to know Chief Brody (Roy Scheider, The French Connection) throughout the movie, and grow to really care about him and his family.
Like Halloween after it, Jaws went on to start a number of cliches of its own. There’s the skeptical mayor character that wants the beaches to remain open despite the threat, and there’s also the fact that they really don’t reveal their monster until about halfway through. The former works better than in any other movie I’ve seen this type of stock character in I think because A) the town feels real; we can understand how it relies on July 4th tourists, and B) Murray Hamilton is such a great actor. I’ve really liked him in everything I’ve seen him in — The Graduate, Anatomy of a Murder, The Hustler, and even an episode of The Twilight Zone where he played Death.
As for not revealing the shark for so long, well that was a happy accident, as I’m sure many people know. The mechanical shark was just having a lot of issues, and they couldn’t get it to work for some of the scenes in which they wished to show it. To compensate, however, Spielberg really displayed his creativity to still make the kill scenes memorable and scary, and this actually made the eventual reveal of the shark all the more effective. Most monster movies try to do this nowadays.
Jaws also stands out for its characters. Richard Dreyfuss (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) is memorable as Hooper, a wealthy oceanographer that befriends Chief Brody and aids him in his attempts at convincing the Mayor of the gravity of the situation. The most memorable character, of course, is Quint, played by Robert Shaw (A Man for All Seasons, The Sting).
He’s just a great character because of how out there he is, and his persona ends up conflicting with Brody’s and especially Hooper’s in an interesting and entertaining way. The last act of the film, featuring all three of our main characters on the Orca attempting to hunt down the shark, is as entertaining as it gets. This is one of those movies where the dialogue can be as exciting or as intriguing as the horror scenes, best encapsulated with Quint’s haunting Indianapolis monologue.
I’m sure you’ve seen the movie, but it’s always worth another watch. I know I tend to go a while without seeing this movie every now and then, and am always incredibly impressed and entertained when I get around to it again.
Rating: 10/10
