Jaws
BIG FISH
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, ’Jaws’ is thirty years old.
Sean Alexander looks back at the fish that changed Hollywood…
The 1970s marks the last golden age of Hollywood cinema. This final hurrah - before the production-machine excess of the eighties and beyond - is largely viewed as encapsulating all that is best about the medium while highlighting how film’s capacity as a crucial emotional and spiritual outlet is often overlooked. With both Vietnam and the Manson Murders symbolically announcing the end of the decade of peace and love, the seventies certainly began in an air of uncertainty and distrust.
Out of these troubled times emerged two factors that were to have a defining influence over the shape of the decade’s cinema. First was a once-in-a-generation upsurge in creative talent; with such decade-defining directors as Scorsese, Coppola and Terence Malick all leaving their indelible stamp by era’s end. Secondly was perhaps the seventies’ most defining characteristic: providing entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Best illustrated by the disaster-movie phenomenon - in which seemingly endless casts of Hollywood A-listers faced catastrophe from air, sea and land - global threats of Armageddon tapped a rich vein of public uncertainty, while marrying people’s then desires for escape and entertainment. Despite their popularity, the cinematic cognoscenti dismissed these proto-blockbusters for lacking any resonance beyond the two hours or so they shamelessly enthralled an audience. Their presence alongside the Taxi Drivers and Godfathers of the decade did not defer the conclusion that a chronic slump in artistic integrity had begun; one to lead all the way to the merchandise-swamped reality of the modern blockbuster.
One of the more satisfied fans of these populist, escapist films was a twenty-six year old director by the name of Steven Spielberg. Raised on a diet of pulp, B-movie features and cinema serials such as Flash Gordon, Spielberg had begun directing on such mainstream TV shows as Columbo; but would first make an impression with an inauspicious TV movie called Duel. Starring Dennis Weaver, Duel was a surprisingly successful mixture of road movie and Hitchcockian suspense story, with Weaver as an ordinary Joe (named ‘Mann’, symbolising Spielberg’s later predilection for everyman protagonists) who finds a long-distance trip home dogged by a seemingly psychotic truck driver. Duel proved so popular with audiences - with its simple premise and grab-by-the-throat treatment of its audience - that it even had a limited cinema release in the UK and on the back of it Spielberg received his first offer of a studio picture; the highly acclaimed - though little seen - The Sugarland Express.
Following Sugarland, great things were expected of the young Mr Spielberg. Praised even by that most notorious of Hollywood critics, Pauline Kael (who suggested that - with Sugarland - Hollywood was looking at the birth of the next Howard Hawks) Spielberg sat down with producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown to discuss his next project. When his eye was drawn to a hefty manuscript on the desk before him, emblazoned with just one word - ‘Jaws’ - Spielberg assumed it to be some quirky, dental biography; unaware of the novel’s buzz since its 1973 publication. Its writer, Peter Benchley, himself had a rich literary heritage to live up to; father Nathaniel had authored the book on which The Russians Are Coming was based. Having long wanted to write a novel about sharks - perhaps in part down to his one-time stint as a speech-writer to President Johnson - Benchley finally found his hook when he read a report of one such beast which had been caught off Long Island: ‘What would happen if one of these things came into a beach and wouldn’t go away?’
‘Jaws’ the novel tapped a nerve with the pulp-reading public. With its diverse mix of literary antecedents - including ‘Enemy of the People’ (everyman’s struggle with authority), ‘Moby Dick’ (Ahab-like desire for revenge on nature) and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (the final, allegorical battle between man and beast) - the book was the perfect summer read; selling millions into the bargain. Literary critics maligned it for that common fault of the bestseller - purple prose - but Zanuck and Brown saw in it the potential for a huge movie success, given its already in-built literary popularity. However Spielberg wasn’t so sure; having read the novel, he concluded that while Benchley could write pacey action scenes, he knew nothing about character; with the Brodys’ disintegrating marriage and Ellen’s passionate fling with ichthyologist Matt Hooper proving particular sources of his scorn. These concerns were not assuaged when the author produced the first of what would turn out to be several potential screenplays for the film.
Still unsure whether he should follow Duel so soon with another tale of an unstoppable juggernaut, Spielberg himself wrote the next screenplay; producing a workable script in just two weeks. This version found disfavour with producers Zanuck and Brown, who - seeing their film head down a creative cul-de-sac - cast around elsewhere for someone to mould the novel’s exciting action with Spielberg’s desire for relatable characters. Following an uncredited five weeks from Howard Sackler - who would later find more, albeit misguided, acceptance for his Jaws 2 screenplay - John Milius was brought in to provide some ‘nautical authenticity’; with him producing the template for Quint’s ‘Indianapolis speech’ which would remain a highlight of the finished film. But no workable script was still ready until renowned script-polisher Carl Gottlieb joined up with Spielberg; injecting much of the humour and machine-gun dialogue which would prove endemic to Jaws’ success. Gottlieb - who would later recall that he never once sat in the same room as the book’s novelist - was also afforded the bit-part role of Amity’s newspaper editor; ensuring he was on-set to provide any last minute rewrites to this most troublesome of scripts.
If Jaws’ literary journey to the screen had been tortuous, it was as nothing compared to the problems Spielberg and co. would encounter with their mechanical shark on location in Massachusetts. Already hailed by producers Zanuck and Brown as the ‘star of the show’, ‘Bruce’ - as Spielberg nicknamed the behemoth in honour of then lawyer Bruce Ramer - operated through a combination of air bladders and an underwater platform to convince audiences of his malign power. Unfortunately as the high salt-water content of main location Martha’s Vineyard ruled out the use of any electronic components, ‘Bruce’s revolutionary - and somewhat temperamental - mechanism broke down on countless occasions. With Spielberg unable to do anything but film around the shark, Jaws’ shooting schedule stretched into weeks, then months. As the film’s modest budget crept into the substantial, producers Zanuck and Brown prepared themselves for the end of their cinema careers.
As was to become apparent with many of the reasons behind Jaws’ success, the delays caused by Bruce’s temperamental performance - and, even when he was working, from yachts spoiling the supposedly empty seas of the film’s climactic hunt - in fact helped to cement its repertory performances. Cast in the lead roles of Chief Brody, Captain Quint and shark-expert Matt Hooper, Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss all hailed from rehearsal heavy, theatre backgrounds. They soon found - when marooned on a remote island week-after-week, while their aquatic co-star stubbornly refused to hit his marks - that there was plenty of time to build believable biographies to temper the film’s otherwise fantastical premise. The results speak for themselves. For one of the recurring accolades awarded to Jaws - despite the scorn that years of special-effect advances have helped heap on the rubber shark - is that it depicts real human beings in a real crisis; twenty-five foot malfunctioning monster or not.
Roy Scheider was not Spielberg’s first choice to play Amity’s Chief of Police. Robert Duvall, then best known for his roles in To Kill a Mockingbird and The Godfather, was the director’s preference but when Duvall fancied himself for the Quint role - and Spielberg didn’t - Spielberg, to his later chagrin, looked elsewhere. Skirting the inevitable interest of disaster-king Charlton Heston, Spielberg turned to an actor who had impressed alongside an altogether different type of shark. Scheider played second fiddle to Gene Hackman in the Oscar-winning The French Connection, but his qualities still shone through to convince Spielberg he had found the perfect everyman for the role of Martin Brody. Scheider in turn was impressed with the director’s verve, and particularly in how he intended to achieve some of the more outlandish elements of Jaws’ then shooting script. Yet once filming began, it was not the prospect of killer sharks leaping like salmon onto boat decks that most concerned the incumbent Chief of Police. Scheider was more frustrated with the constant appeals from his director to underplay the role; especially amidst the more grandstanding - and eye-catching - turns of Shaw and Dreyfuss around him. What Scheider - like the audience - was to learn was that the underplaying of his character was the key to Brody’s appeal as unlikely hero - this was no larger-than-life fisherman, nor a show-off freshman shark-addict, but just an ordinary Joe not a million miles away from Dennis Weaver’s truck-troubled salesman in Duel.
If Brody is the ‘eyes of the viewer’ on this grisly tableau, then Hooper is arguably Spielberg casting himself in his own movie. Bookish, anti-establishment and just a little bit nerdy-looking, Hooper as played by Richard Dreyfuss represents the new order on Amity’s closeted isle; much as Spielberg would portray himself as the young upstart against Hollywood convention. Equal parts ego and self-derision, Hooper in the film is nevertheless a very different prospect to Hooper in the book; a former Yale graduate, his literary sun-kissed looks had put a further spanner in the Brodys’ already troubled marriage. And that final descent into the shark cage had culminated in death, not escape; seemingly as punishment for such base misdemeanours (although, in truth, it was film-makers Ron and Valerie Taylor’s capturing of live shark footage that spared film Hooper his literary forebear’s fate; the beast’s demolishing of the shark cage only occurring after Dreyfuss’ stuntman had fled the scene). Dreyfuss was cast by Spielberg following a highlighting turn in his pal George Lucas’ American Graffiti. And his arrival some half-hour into Jaws - aided by that memorable schoolboy-ish cackle - helps undercut much of the mordent horror seen up to that point. Hooper crucially also provides the by-now beleaguered Chief with a reassuring shoulder amidst all the denial and indifference. For like Brody, Hooper is a fish out of water on Amity; his college-boy demeanour marking him out from the landlubbers infesting the island’s slightly backward community. His bonding with Brody - while on the surface forged through adversity as the only two sane men on the isle - has more to do with their mutual feeling that they don’t belong here and will never be accepted even if they do.
As with Brody, Spielberg had to settle for inspired compromise for the role of Quint. First choice Lee Marvin less than graciously declined the director’s overtures, while Sterling Hayden also baulked; although more as a consequence of the tax-shelter problems he was encountering than for any artistic reason. Final choice Robert Shaw - himself no stranger to revenue interest - was already a veteran of stage and screen; most recently in Zanuck and Brown‘s The Sting, where Shaw had played significant support to then Hollywood colossi Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Spielberg saw in Shaw a perfect encapsulation of Quint’s brutal, world-weary cynicism; a man - like his sea-faring alter-ego - disillusioned by the modern world around him. With his lifetime of repertory experience, Shaw offered his director a wealth of filming options; and Spielberg significantly makes full use of the actor’s multiple-take technique in the final film.
Holed up of an evening at Martha’s Vineyard - with little more to do than eat dinner and work the script to death - Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw’s nightly workshops of theatre-style improvisation proved crucial to Jaws’ layered appeal. And the triumvirate’s efforts paid most dividends during the concentrated character dynamics of the climactic hunt. While it may be at the risk of stretching a point, it could be argued that the trio represent the classic three-way model of the Freudian conscious mind. For, like Star Trek’s Kirk-Spock-McCoy before them, they embody three individuals as one; Brody - the identification figure - is Ego, Quint - all unrestrained passion - Id and Hooper - with his frequently fruitless attempts to impose rationality through science and control - Superego.
Such devotion to characterisation is not restricted to Jaws’ principal players. Every character within has a life and heartbeat all their own; often expressed through no more than a look or a glance. Coupled with this, exposition is kept to the bare minimum, with much of what we learn about the protagonists achieved with little or no dialogue. One of Jaws’ most celebrated scenes is the post-Tiger-shark interlude between Brody and his youngest son. Stung both by the bereaved Mrs Kintner’s words and her vengeful slap, Brody sits at the kitchen table, mulling over his unfinished dinner and the man-eating problem still stalking the beaches. Suddenly he becomes aware of his infant son’s mimicking of his facial expressions; snarling - somewhat shark-like - at him to acknowledge the attention. Observed by the watching Mrs Brody, the scene encapsulates two of Jaws’ fundamental themes; the strength of family bonds - as illustrated by the Brodys - and how the innocence of youth belies the cynicism of adulthood. Given what we now know of Spielberg’s later descent into his own brand of emotional manipulation, it is surprising to find just how restrained this scene is.
Elsewhere, the supporting cast all provide memorable moments of characterisation that help knit Jaws’ rich tapestry of human life. Surprisingly, Brody’s wife Ellen is the sole example of femininity - beyond Chrissie’s semi-nude titillation - amidst the Boy’s Own bravado of the film’s macho adventuring. And, as Spielberg would later echo through both Mary in E.T. and Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark (to name but two), women prove to be the touchstones of rationality in Spielberg pictures. Ellen’s portrayer, Lorraine Gary, was in fact only cast by Spielberg as a favour to studio-head Sid Sheinberg; whose wife Gary was. But it is somewhat unfair on her that this ‘stigma’ still maligns what is one of the film’s most effective performances. Likewise Amity’s Mayor, Larry Vaughan - played by Murray Hamilton - is another perfect snapshot of mid-seventies American values. With his reverence for the dollar above all else, Vaughan is a perfect cameo of small-town, self-aggrandising philosophy; a man with complete belief in the propaganda he peddles. And shorn of the novel’s Mafia subplot - in which the Mayor’s motivation stems more from his obligations to the local mob than from any devotion to capitalistic ethos - Hamilton crafts the perfect spin-doctor some two decades before the term became common parlance.
Spielberg’s direction joins these disparate elements of characterisation and performance into the highly effective result. Given the behind-the-scenes headaches of this most difficult of shoots, it is all the more remarkable that any cogent film comes out at all; let alone one which continues to be so well-regarded. While the frequent delays allowed the principals to breathe a life into their parts beyond that granted on the printed page, it also forced Spielberg to re-think how he was to depict both the shark and the terror it would ultimately wreck on the island’s inhabitants. And as with much else on Jaws’ shoot, inspiration would come through accident rather than invention; not least of which composer John Williams’ maddeningly-simple signature theme. This two-tone tattoo which comes to signify the shark’s presence is as emblematic of Jaws’ status in modern pop culture as anything else but its real key was in allowing Spielberg to suggest the menace of the shark, while the real thing was no doubt off malfunctioning somewhere else.
Although interestingly, Jaws’ opening scene would have remained the same, functioning shark or not. Never was it his intention for Spielberg to ‘spoil’ his audience with the star attraction from the word go. So Chrissie’s doomed midnight swim is executed in exactly the way in which its director always intended; as a nightmarish hint to the terror that will plague the audience for the following two hours. Critics have suggested that Chrissie’s death is one of the most tasteless scenes in the film; with its rape-allegory lending ample ammunition to the film’s misogynist-claiming detractors. But this is to overlook Spielberg’s recognition that audiences need to start with a bang to get their attention. The fact that this inaugural death - at least, until Quint’s own near-climax demise - is the most can’t-bear-to-look moment in the entire film suggests that, contrary to criticism, Spielberg’s instincts were dead right.
No examination of Spielberg’s vaudeville direction would be complete without a look at arguably the film’s most accomplished scene: the first beach interlude culminating in young Alex Kintner’s death. More than anywhere else in Spielberg’s entire oeuvre, this four minutes is a master-class in Hitchcockian suspense. Although, just to buck convention, the scene is in fact more about Brody’s worst fears being fulfilled than it is about the bloodshed out in the surf. Achieved with a sublime mix of the disorienting (the wipes that gradually pull Brody closer to the viewer) and the mundane (the prattle of the islanders that punctuates the Chief’s growing unease), Spielberg drops so many red herrings in the water that the sense of something major about to happen becomes almost unbearable. And when it does, only then does the director unleash his piece-de-resistance; the much-copied, though never-bettered, push-pull shot that drags Brody towards the audience, while at the same time making him shrink as though into his own skin. This is Spielberg’s signature shot in Jaws. And fittingly contains no blood or death-like spectacle at all.
Spielberg truly comes into his element - like Quint, when the action moves out to sea - in the film-within-a-film second half showcasing Brody and co.’s nautical hunt for their nemesis. Having established Jaws as a thriller in which man battles with the forces of nature, the translocation of the action from land to sea finally unleashes the film’s latent desire to be a rollickingly fun adventure story. Even John Williams’ hitherto mix of summer-inspired strings and doom-laden ‘der-dum’ shark theme lets rip into a full-blooded, swashbuckling action soundtrack. Stripped now of its reassuringly cosy Amity beaches and quaint town-houses, the film becomes a much purer distillation of what it has been from the off: a full-on fight between Man and his darkest fears.
The hunt section also highlights where ‘Bruce’s recurrent absences caused the biggest continuity headaches. Rarely do you see two shots in the last hour that match, as neither sky colour nor horizon convince the viewer he is watching lineal action over the space of just two days. But it is a testament to how Spielberg has his audience so hooked by now that such concerns fall away even on repeated viewings. The tension, so ramped up already, now becomes unbearable as the inevitable showdown between the three-men-in-a-boat and their aquatic quarry draws ever closer. Yet Spielberg still has the tenacity - not to mention, guts - to bisect this section with an on-the-surface spurious interlude into male bonding and false machismo. Culminating with Quint’s compelling tribute to his former comrades on the Indianapolis - the authorship of which remains disputed - the night-scene on the Orca is arguably Jaws’ most relatable scene; a frank and realistic depiction of mutual respect through adversity. Perfectly played by Shaw, Dreyfuss and Scheider - whose Chief Brody is never more underlined as the outsider of the trio than here - the scene segues perfectly into the film’s final day of reckoning; as Brody, Hooper and Quint finally face their destinies.
Soon Hooper is in his cage - another tip of the hat to the film’s fundamental theme of protection - and Bruce is belly-diving onto the Orca’s flooded deck, just as Roy Scheider overheard Spielberg’s plans to do so. And with the film apparently risking its truce with plausibility - by finally showing the shark in all its rubber and fibreglass glory - the most brutal and gut-wrenching death in Jaws occurs. Even now there is a numbing sense of horror watching Quint slide inexorably to his end between the shark’s teeth. The fact that Robert Shaw culminates his steely-eyed performance with the most blood-curdling scream imaginable only underlines the anguish both Quint and the audience feel at his fate. Surprisingly, this is the only death in two hours that we witness uncensored on screen, resplendent in all the grand-guignol blood-letting you’d expect. For Quint’s death is the money-shot of Jaws. And despite the punch-the-air heroism of Brody’s final, well-aimed shot - and the light-hearted climax as he and Hooper swim for the beach - it is Robert Shaw’s death cry that echoes long in the mind after John Williams’ reassuring strings have faded.
So just what provides Jaws with its resonance - beyond the two hours of scares and thrills - some three decades after we first became afraid to go in the water? Well, first and foremost, it is a terrific action adventure film, made by a director at a time when he was more open to risk and less liable for schmaltz than in later years. But Jaws is not just an adventure movie, in the way that it is not just a scream-fest. Coming itself out of the glut of disaster movies which threatened to flood the early-seventies market, Jaws heralded another emergent - and highly lucrative - sub-genre destined to dominate over the following decade: the slasher movie. With its bikini-clad fodder - and most memorably in Chrissie’s coitus-interuptus death-by-rape at the jaws of the shark - the film can be seen as a forerunner to the Halloweens and Friday the 13ths to come; with their similarly sharp-weaponed antagonists only too eager to punish the beautiful and the sexually promiscuous.
To truly understand Jaws’ appeal is to understand the climate of American socio-political life at the time of its release. Haunted by Vietnam, and redolent with images of politically-active youth protesting from University campuses, America in the mid-seventies was a country experiencing a crisis of faith with its leaders. Arguably the already-established appeal of the disaster movie took root as a result of this very sense of instability; of a fear that might was no longer right in the face of a cunning and resourceful enemy. With Nixon and the Watergate scandal becoming an almost real-life disaster film, people no longer trusted those they had elected to serve. And sought in their cinematic heroes someone who was more like them, as previous generations had fastened onto the outsiders of John Ford’s westerns; or the nameless - and almost dialogue-less - vigilantes typified by Clint Eastwood’s cheroot-chewing ‘Man With No Name’ in the Dollars trilogy.
In Jaws, these archetypes are clearly identifiable. Mayor Vaughan is former President Richard Nixon, self-appointed guardian of the public Good; but a man more than willing to risk further carnage in the name of good ol’ US capitalism. Brody is the everyman that audiences identify with; even more so given he is an outsider and disrespected by the people he is paid to protect. As underplayed by Scheider, Brody is awkward, emasculated and afraid of the very element in which his antagonist revels. When he conquers both his fear of water - and, by extension, the shark - audiences cheer not just at one man’s triumph over human fallibility, but because Brody could, in a very real sense, be one of them on the movie screen.
Given the post-Vietnam implication that a powerful machine could be usurped by a primitive force, it is telling to note just how much Jaws is about territoriality and defence. The two halves of the action are themselves neatly divided into events predominantly based on the land and the sea. And the notion of ‘territoriality’ is ubiquitous throughout, whether it is in Hooper’s inclination to uphold that particular theory of shark-behaviour; or in the ever-present picket fences that enclose both the beaches and Amity’s picture-postcard town. The Chief of Police is himself frequently jibed about his dislike of the water, and by implication his status as a non-islander. While his wife - in one of Spielberg’s most effective examples of using throw-away dialogue to embellish character - is given an insight into the mindset of the community where she and her husband now live. ‘When do I get to be an islander?’ she asks one of the beach residents in the lead-up to the death of the Kintner boy. ‘Never’, she is told, ‘You have to be born here’.
Irrespective of all this talk of interpretation and resonance, the film works first and foremost as a primal scream movie. The fear engendered by Jaws is perhaps our most primal fear of all: dying. However, this is not just a fear of death in the routine, arbitrary way of everyday occurrence; rather it is a far baser fear of being eaten alive. Coupled with this is the perceived helplessness of becoming a victim to an unseen attacker; a seam which Spielberg mines to its fullest with his frequent shots of headless swimmers from below the water’s surface. He is acknowledging the mistake we all make in thinking that calm, surface events are anything but facades. While at the same time reinforcing how death can often come when we least expect it, and from the unlikeliest of sources. Admittedly, this tapping of primal fears would have struck a chord had Jaws been released at any other time. It is interesting to note - given the Vietnam angle - just how successful such nerve-striking was. And perhaps helps explain how - in this contemporary world of suicide bombers and the ever-present ‘War on Terror’ - the film’s resonance remains un-blunted some thirty years on.
On 20th June 1975, Jaws opened large across America, becoming in just a few, short weeks the inaugural event movie. It was the first film to pass the holy-grail of $100 million in ticket receipts, and its success established a pattern of summer Hollywood blockbusters which still stands today. Along with a certain other film called Star Wars - released less than two years later - it is both celebrated as the quintessence of mass-entertainment cinema, and reviled for its perceived acceleration of blockbuster culture. But one thing remains clear: few films - whether before, during or after Jaws’ watershed success - have come close to marrying the same sense of popcorn spectacle with a resonant human drama. That the filmmakers who followed Jaws - and those adventures in a galaxy far, far away - largely failed to capitalise on this is regrettable; but to blame the pioneers for their failure is both remiss and facile. Jaws recalls a time when special effects favoured creative improvisation over digital sanitation (just compare Bruce with the CGI sharks of ‘Jaws-for-the-millennium’ Deep Blue Sea, and ask yourself which provides more visceral effect). It reminds you that audiences were once allowed the honour of deciding for themselves what did - and didn’t - make a great movie; not spoon-fed such conclusions by dubiously-motivated studio executives. Fundamentally, Jaws represents the allure that drew a generation to the cinema in the first place, and the thrill of what beguiled them once they got there.