Jaws changed the ground rules for Hollywood for ever, as most film students know. It was the first “summer blockbuster” in the US and it also exhibited the benefits of a national release with saturation marketing coverage. The poster campaign was itself both arresting and spectacular – I know of a theatre in my hometown in Kerala which carried the famed Jaws poster in its ticker counter for years. The movie was both a critical smash (three Academy Awards) and a very popular movie. It would also become the biggest-grossing Hollywood film for a time and would go on to make over US$2 billion since its release.
And Jaws has much to commend it – a superb opening sequence, interesting characters, a chase story for the ages, wonderful set-pieces, a pulse-pounding soundtrack, a publicity campaign like no other till then, and three great character actors at the top of their game (Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as young oceanographer Matt Hooper and Robert Shaw as salty shark-hunter Quint).
Much of the success of Jaws is laid at the fact that we never see the killer great white till much later in the movie, even though it is obvious early on that the damage is all being caused by a monster shark. A shark movie these days would opt to show the fish from hundreds of angles right from the first scene but a canny Spielberg opted for the “less is more” approach - that arguably was a big factor in the movie’s lasting impact. Like all classics, it rewards repeated viewings.
The source novel by Peter Benchley is a fine read too, though it differs markedly from the movie adaptation. It is beautifully written, like many of the best-sellers of the 1970s. At the heart of the book is a passing affair between Chief Brody’s wife Ellen and the city-slicker Hooper. That incident colours the entire relationship between Brody and Hooper in the novel. But none of that is there in the movie. The three protagonists in the film are shown to be united against the great danger terrorising a beach community, unlike in the novel where they are constantly bickering with each other when they are not pursuing the killer fish.
On the other hand, there is a wonderful monologue about sharks attacking the USS Indianapolis in World War II narrated by Quint that is a showstopper in the film. The most famous line in the movie (“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”, Brody tells Quint in shock and disbelief after sighting the giant shark in the middle of the sea) was ad-libbed by Scheider and was not taken from the book. The ending of the movie is also almost entirely different from the novel – the filmmakers opted for a more “explosive” climax which they probably saw as a bigger crowd-pleaser than the much-quieter ending of the novel.
I first watched Jaws on a friend’s VCR in 1982, if memory serves me right. I remember being scared witless when a certain severed head appears from the murky darkness of the ocean depths (it obviously did not help that I was only around 12 years old then and that we were all sitting around and watching this in darkness! Talk about “child-appropriate material”...) That single scene still has a raw power to shock, as I discovered over 30 years later. Compared to modern movies there is little blood and gore in Jaws but you do leave the screening with the impression that it was a very bloody film. Such is the power of suggestion.
The massive movie shark itself (a creaky mechanical apparatus nicknamed “Bruce” and also some actual footage of actual sharks shot off Australia) looks pretty fake now but the clever editing ensured that we do not get a chance to dwell on its “looks” all that much.
John Williams’ iconic music was, of course, a massive factor in the film’s success – the main shark theme would go on to become a classic piece of suspense music, parodied and copied in equal measure by scores of filmmakers and artists. The moment I think of the movie, the first thing that comes to my mind is the soundtrack as the creature relentlessly carried out its attacks.
And, for those who are hard-core fans of the Jaws phenomenon, a third essential element would be to read The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb - the author was the co-writer of the screenplay and also appeared briefly in the movie as a minor character. The Jaws Log has been describes as the greatest "making-of" book ever written on a movie. I am not sure whether it is exactly that, but it is still a must-read for Jaws fanatics as it depicts the various challenges of shooting the movie on a day-to-day basis. Remember that this was way before any of the cutting-edge CGI that Spielberg would masterfully use two decades later in his other headline-grabbing movies like Jurassic Park. And, this book is also written in a very amusing manner which adds to its many charms. The Jaws Log, now in an updated edition, is an ideal companion to a timeless cinematic work of art and to the best-selling novel that inspired the film.