by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was the 30th
anniversary DVD release of Jaws, which I
hadn’t seen since its 1975 release (when my father and stepmother took me) and
Charles had never seen in toto at
all. As all the world knows, it deals with a “rogue” great white shark that has
somehow detached itself (the shark is referred throughout as “he” but the
gender distinction is pretty irrelevant) from the packs in which sharks usually
swim and is hanging out on the beaches of the fictitious Massachusetts town of
“Amity Island” (really Martha’s Vineyard, which actually plays “Amity” in the
film — though as one imdb.com trivia contributor pointed out, Amity is shown as
one self-contained city with its own local government, while the real Martha’s
Vineyard is divided among six local jurisdictions) and feeding on the local
bathers. The film takes place in the run-up to the Fourth of July and starts
with the famous scene in which a bunch of teenagers are having a nighttime
party on the beach. (Their long hair immediately dates this film.) Christine
“Chrissie” Watkins (Susan Backlinie) challenges her boyfriend to join her for a
late-night swim and runs across the beach, taking off her clothes as she goes.
The boyfriend passes out drunk on the beach and never makes it into the water —
lucky him, because when Chrissie goes in she’s pulled down and drowned by a
carefully unshown menace we know,
because we’ve read the pre-film publicity and seen the poster art, is a great
white shark but which is carefully kept from view. Amity has recently hired a
former New York police officer named Brody (Roy Scheider in what’s easy to
imagine as a sequel to his role in The French Connection; after he and his hot-shot partner, played by Gene
Hackman — who was considered for this part in Jaws before Scheider was cast — disgraced themselves in The
French Connection’s final scene it would be
easy to imagine him seeking a lower-pressure job in a small town) to be their
police chief, and Brody figures out immediately after Chrissy’s body is
recovered (in one of the film’s grimmest scenes, it’s being eaten not by flies
but by crabs) that the girl was the victim of a shark attack and orders that
the Amity beaches be closed. He gets dumped on by the town’s mayor (Murray
Hamilton) and the other Amity bigwigs, who point out that the entire town is
sustained all year by the income from summer tourists and they can’t do anything to jeopardize that. Other victims materialize,
including a young boy whose death is indicated when the yellow beach towel he
was using floats back to the shore, sans its occupant and with pieces chewed out of it and bits of blood.
Indeed, one of the surprising things about Jaws 40 years later is how strongly director Steven Spielberg
was worshiping at the shrine of St. Val Lewton: the title character doesn’t
appear on screen until the film is more than half over and until then the shark
attacks are depicted with superb indirection, daring leaving it up to the
viewer’s imagination to fill in the details instead of splashing the screen
with blood and gore.
Part of that may have simply been necessity — Universal’s
prop department made three mechanical robot sharks to play the great white,
which got the collective nickname “Bruce,” but the first time one of them was
used it sank to the bottom of the Martha’s Vineyard bay they were using as
their location, and much of the shark footage used in the final cut was
archival footage of real sharks —
but it also indicated the all-embracing command Spielberg, even this early (it
was only his second feature film — third if you count Duel, the feature-length TV-movie Spielberg had directed
with Dennis Weaver as a cross-country motorist being chased by a driverless
truck), had of the grammar of film: when to hold a shot on screen and when to
cut, when to let a scene play silently and when to add music (John Williams
became a major film-music “name” with this score, and as in his later score for
Spielberg’s E.T. a lot of it is
surprisingly dissonant and musically “advanced” for a big-budget Hollywood
blockbuster), when to hold the camera still and when to let it move — most of
the second half of the film, which features the three male leads, police chief
Brody, icthyologist Dr. Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss — when the film first
came out I remember joking that the Mad Scientist had been replaced by the Cute
Scientist) and boat captain Quint (Robert Shaw, whose relentless overacting really takes away from the entertainment value of this film
— I thought so in 1975 and I still do), out in Amity Bay after the great white,
was shot with the camera hand-held so the audience would get the feeling of
actually being in a small boat in the ocean. (One cast member joked that this
made Jaws the most expensive home
movie in history.) Charles read Jaws
— particularly the second half of it — as an intriguing modern-dress reworking
of Moby Dick, with the irascible
captain, the oddly assorted crew (way too much is made of Roy Scheider’s character being seasick and hating
the water) and the great sea monster they’re going after — and the parallels
would have been even stronger if the film had followed the source novel by
Peter Benchley (who wrote a script Spielberg decided was unusable, so Carl
Gottlieb and some other uncredited scribes rewrote it) more closely. In the
film as it stands, Captain Quint is killed when the boat, the Orca (the scientific name for a killer whale, chosen
because real-life Orcas are the only predators who prey on great white sharks),
is rammed by the shark; in the book, Hooper is also killed when the shark cage
in which he descends into the water intending to shoot a drug into the shark
that will poison it is rammed. (Spielberg originally intended Hooper to die,
but the best footage he had of the cage being rammed had neither Dreyfuss nor a
stunt double in it, and so he decided to have the character live after all.)
Spielberg even had the idea of introducing the character of Quint by showing
him in a movie theatre watching the 1956 film of Moby Dick and laughing at all the mistakes.
Jaws holds up as a quite good movie but hardly a
deathless classic; it’s got a lot of oddly slow and dull moments for what’s
supposed to be a nail-biting thriller, and it’s good in a Lewtonesque way that
we see so little of the shark (just four minutes out of a 125-minute running
time) but it also is disappointing given what we’ve become used to in
blockbusters since. Indeed, Jaws
is the movie auteur critics and
film buffs love to hate because it was the film that set the pattern for the
modern-day summer action-movie release; instead of being given a slow buildup,
opening in a few big-city theatres and gradually spreading out to smaller
locales, it was released nationwide at once to almost 500 theatres, backed with
a $700,000 TV ad campaign, and it became the first movie in history to gross
over $100 million and set the pattern for later summer blockbusters. It was
also shot on a cheap film stock Eastman Kodak had introduced and sold the
studios on using in the 1970’s, which faded so rapidly that when Universal
first released Jaws on home video
in 1985 the movie had to be colorized even though it was only 10 years old and
had been in color originally. And there’s one piece of trivia on imdb.com that
jolted me: “To create the sound of a drowning woman during post-production, Susan Backlinie (who
played Chrissy, the shark’s first victim) was positioned, head upturned, in
front of a microphone, while water from above was poured down into her throat.”
Essentially, she was waterboarded! Jaws was also part of a cycle of big-budget disaster movies from the major
studios, including The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, which
led me to joke at the time that the film companies were trying to boost movie
attendance by systematically scaring people away from all other forms of
entertainment. Indeed, the tourist business at seaside resorts generally
nosedived after Jaws was
released, though according to imdb.com one seafood restaurant on the coast of
Cape Cod tried to counteract this by advertising, “Eat Fish — Get Back.”
