Friday's Old Fashioned: Jaws (1975)

“Jaws” was a brewing disaster turned phenomenon turned touchstone. Released June 1, 1975, Steven Spielberg’s horror-thriller hybrid based on Peter Benchley’s novel about a great white terrorizing a fictional New England island was a smashing success that recalibrated the summer movie season as fertile ground for the movie industry and in the ensuing years has either been credited with or blamed for, or both, ushering in the era of the Hollywood blockbuster. Its famously troubled production, meanwhile, besot by a malfunctioning mechanical shark, causing cost overruns and shooting delays, became the mother of all necessity is the mother of invention stories. Given all that, 50 years later, it can be hard to see the movie for the movie itself. But in rewatching “Jaws” beginning to end for the first time in, I honestly don’t know, years, maybe decades, that’s what I was looking for, the movie. And what I found was one that for all its immense, over-scrutinized knowns still retains the ability to surprise.

There’s that scene when spunky oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and even-keeled Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) are cutting open the shark that isn’t the shark, which we know because Hooper finds a Louisiana license plate in its stomach. I LLOLd (literally laughed out loud); I had honestly forgotten about the license plate. And I had honestly forgotten that the first time we see the shark is not during the seafaring showdown at the end but much earlier, when the young boy Alex Kintner is killed by the villainous great white and suddenly, we see the shark rolling over in full view of the camera floating just above. This shot is fascinating! It feels so off-kilter, utterly unexpected, as if a stagehand started drawing the curtain open too soon and quickly closed it again, there, then gone, like you weren’t quite sure you saw it, which is probably why people like me literally forget they ever did.

That’s a moment made as much by the editing as anything, the decision to give us this glimpse. And it goes to show why the Oscar-winning work of editor Verna Fields was as crucial to the success of “Jaws” as the also Oscar-winning score of John Williams. Spielberg’s expert blocking within roaming long takes helps imbue a sense of community and establish character, but what really lingered with me was how he placed his camera behind objects and how Fields judiciously pieced those shots together to instill unease between beachgoers as so much oblivious shark bait in contrast to the ominous waters that lie just beyond. These images are unlikely echoes of the one in which Brody and Hooper stand with Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) in front of the looming Amity Island billboard, tourism dwarfing them all, Spielberg’s sun-dappled version of “Blade Runner.”

Indeed, let’s talk for a minute about Mayor Vaughn, and the elected head of Amity’s sport jacket with the patterned anchors (Robert Ellsworth, Costume Designer), and how that in-your-face, disingenuous sort of branding by clothing evokes the current American Secretary of Defense. Too much? Did you not want to hear about politics – egads – in this post about an enjoyable summer movie? Hey, where were you five years ago during the COVID summer of 2020 when Mayor Vaughn leaving the beaches open despite people, some his constituents, being eaten by a shark became the obvious and apropos allegory for an America that insisted the Almighty Economy comes first. And that’s the thing. The way Mayor Vaughn is presented and played, he’s not merely a movie villain moving the plot forward, he’s a satirical embodiment of ruthless capitalism, of what happens when you exclusively see humans as consumers. Viewing it through that 2020 lens, frankly, it hardly feels like exaggeration, though that’s not why the satire ultimately peters out. Spielberg seems to be building toward a knockout punch, but sort of like his version of “War of the Worlds” 30 years later, in the end, he can’t help but pull it.

The last time we see Mayor Vaughn, he is muttering to himself, and I wonder how “Jaws” might have felt had it ended there, like Mayor Vaughn is Jack Nicholson muttering to himself at the end of “The Pledge,” the game-changing 1970s blockbuster reconfigured as “Chinatown.” Ah well. “Jaws” concludes as such a movie must, with some dudes – Brody and Hooper and the vengeance-minded Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) – getting in a boat and going out to sea to kill the shark. This exceptionally well-done extended sequence has some existential notes, but it’s more adventurous in spirit than I recalled, the famously suspenseful Williams score sometimes giving way to an almost rousing swashbuckler sensation. Quint might die, but Brody and Hooper jerry-rig a solution to get their prey, delivering a few pithy lines to top it all off, in a circular sort of way turning the shark into a metaphor of the movie and its makers, despite all the odds finding a way to succeed.