Jaws (1975)

There are films that define a decade, and then there are films that define cinema itself. Jaws, released in the summer of 1975 by Universal Pictures and produced by Richard Zanuck and David Brown, sits comfortably in the second category. Based on Peter Benchley's bestselling 1974 novel of the same name, it follows the police chief of the fictional coastal town of Amity Island who, alongside a marine biologist and a weathered shark hunter, is forced to confront a great white shark terrorising the local waters. The film arrived at a moment when Hollywood was reinventing itself, and its massive commercial success helped establish the very concept of the summer blockbuster as we now know it. Whether that's entirely a good thing for cinema is a conversation for another day, but the film's cultural footprint is difficult to overstate.

For Steven Spielberg, Jaws was only his second theatrical feature, and the production was, by most accounts, a gruelling one. The mechanical shark (nicknamed "Bruce" by the crew) malfunctioned so persistently in the salt water off Martha's Vineyard that Spielberg was frequently forced to shoot around it rather than with it. That constraint, born entirely of necessity, turned out to be one of the great accidental creative decisions in film history. Spielberg had already demonstrated a feel for sustained menace with Duel (1971), his made-for-television thriller, and he would go on to build one of the most remarkable directorial careers in Hollywood with films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). But it was here, wrestling with a broken prop fish in the Atlantic, that something clicked into place.

The three leads give the film a human core that lifts it well above the creature-feature genre it nominally belongs to. Roy Scheider, who had already shown his range in The French Connection (1971), brings an everyman warmth and quiet anxiety to Police Chief Brody, a man who is afraid of the water and has no business being on a boat. Richard Dreyfuss is energetic and likeable as the young oceanographer Hooper, while Robert Shaw's Quint, the shark hunter with sea salt practically crusted into his skin, is one of the great supporting turns of the 1970s. Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton round out the Amity side of things, with Hamilton's Mayor Vaughn providing a nicely plausible portrait of small-town denial. John Williams's score, spare and percussive in a way that makes it sound almost like a joke until it very much isn't, became one of the most recognisable pieces of music in film history. These are the ingredients. What Spielberg does with them is something else entirely.

Big shark. People hunt it. BUT IT'S GREAT! It’s just a big shark eating people… and yet, it’s one of the greatest films ever made. That’s Spielberg’s genius. The simplicity of Jaws is exactly what makes it so gripping. The characters are instantly memorable, the tension is unbearable, and despite a mechanical shark that barely worked, Spielberg turns every scene into a masterclass in suspense. You feel the fear, you feel the dread, and somehow, you feel completely attached to a trio of guys on a boat trying to kill a sea creature. And the soundtrack? Two notes. That’s all it takes. EVERYONE knows it. EVERYONE fears it.

I keep coming back to that point about the shark not working properly, because it really does feel like the key to everything. If the mechanical beast had performed to schedule, we might have ended up with something polished but unremarkable, a reasonable genre picture that nobody much thinks about today. Instead, we got a film built on implication and atmosphere, on what you don't see rather than what you do. It's a lesson the horror genre has been learning and forgetting ever since. For me, revisiting Jaws never feels like homework or nostalgia. It just feels like watching a film that knows exactly what it's doing, every single time. You can't fake that. Some films earn their reputation. This one deserved it before the credits rolled.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 1975  | Watched: 2009-07-03

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Steven Spielberg: Duel (1971) · Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) · The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
More with Roy Scheider: The French Connection (1971)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)