10 Reasons Why Jaws Is The Most Rewatchable Movie Ever Made
As odd as it may seem, there are some people out there who do not quite understand the majesty of Jaws. I know, it’s strange and maybe a little bit frightening but as your Granny (hopefully) used to say - it takes all sorts to make a world.
And as a sort of internet-based public service announcement, I’ve put together a list of ten things that make Jaws the kind of movie you’ll want to watch again and again.
So, grab yourself a can of Narragansett (or, if you prefer, styrofoam cup of coffee), close the beaches and put on your best wide lapelled nylon sports jacket (striped or anchor motif are both fine).
10. The Score
John Williams - hands down the greatest ever composer of film music. More Oscars that anyone else, still working into his 90s and seemingly able to summon up magical melodies from thin air. The supremely simple main theme for Jaws is just one part of the story. There are swashbuckling pirate themes, twinkly bits of glockenspiel, brass galore and even vibraphones and electric pianos hidden in this most wonderful musical mix.
9. The Dolly Zoom Moment
Spielberg pinched it from Hitchcock who probably stole it from someone else but it was the man who would go on to dominate cinema for all of the 80s and beyond who used the shot to its most heart-stopping effect. Ripping you out of your seat and seemingly squashing and contorting all the surrounding scenery, it makes you feel exactly what Chief Brody is feeling as he watches little Alex Kintner get turned into chum.
8. The Extras
Nearly all of the people milling about in the background of Jaws are locals. Spielberg needed real people to bring Amity alive. He could’ve gone for professional extras but he knew he’d have to tell them how to look authentic, he had enough problems with his toothy star to have to deal with anything else.
Jaws extras escape the water during fake cardboard shark fin scene
7. Practical Effects
I love Back to the Future with all my heart but when Marty McFly mutters to himself in Part II that ‘the shark still looks fake’ as he gets attacked by the advert for Jaws 19 it made me roll my eyes (but only in a good natured way).
Yes, sometimes you can see the shark isn’t real. OK, so the wide shot at the end when Bruce is snapping away, trying to get to Quint looks ever so slightly…plastic. BUT! You know this isn’t a real shark before you see the movie, the publicity told you that. And back in the 70s, effects weren’t sometimes the best with wobbly back projection and model work but the thing about Jaws is look at all the rest of the movie. When you first saw it you were petrified. You couldn’t go in a bath - let alone the sea or a swimming pool - in case a shark got you. It was that effective! You feel the terror much more than any CGI monolith from our FX-saturated blockbusters present day.
6. Camera Angles
Shooting at low level with the water lapping against the lens really gives the audience nowhere to go. It’s like you’re bobbing about off the white sandy beaches of Amity. The shark could be right underneath you! Spielberg knew he had to use every trick in the book to keep his audience engaged, to push them off-balance and have them worrying about when the next attack might happen. Bruce was being a royal pain in the arse so he had to amp up the fear factor any way her could.
Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) gets attacked by the shark in Steven Spielberg's shark thriler Jaws
5. The Entire Cast
It is flawless casting. Roy Scheider as Brody is impeccable as the big city cop who’s terrified of the water yet for some reason moved to the coast. Could it be his wife Ellen played with dry wit and skill by Lorraine Gary told him she couldn’t take New York any longer? Probably. You get Richard Dreyfus as motormouth rich kid Matt Hooper squaring up to the incomparable Robert Shaw putting in a career best turn as the shark-hating Quint. And on top of all this comes Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn, the man who refused to believe that he’d become the Mayor of Shark City. Spielberg hired character actors and TV players, let them workshop their roles and in the end, magic was born. It’s simply like they’re real people. You care about them. You don’t get that in most big movies.
Roy Scheider (Chief Brody), Robert Shaw (Quint) and Richard Dreyfuss (Matt Hooper) starred in Steven Spielberg's JAWS (1975)
4. Martha’s Vineyard
The search was long - going from Florida to the Caribbean and even considering California but in the end the quint clapboard houses and stores of the Vineyard was picked and turned into Amity. Now a place where (mostly) the rich and famous have their mansions, it started as a location for fishermen, farmers and even one or two smugglers. It really looks like the sort of place you’d want to spend a summer too - maybe without the uninvited guest.
Growing up by the coast in the 70s, Amity had a particular pull for me. We even had a little ferry from one spit of land to another and I often day dreamed that somewhere down there in that shallow channel, a 25ft 3 ton monster was waiting…
Once again, Spielberg embed his simple story with authenticity that other directors might not think to do.
3. When you known it took so long to shoot.
Watching the movie, you marvel at how it was such a terrible production to get on film. How could a movie that zips along as it does have been such a slog to make? This was down, in no small part, to Verna Fields the editor. Each day she had barely any footage to work with but My God she certainly spun gold out of straw! And how did Spielberg convince his cast and crew to keep concentrating when the weather was dull or yet another sailboat appeared in shot after waiting an hour for the last one to get out of the way? How do you fend off a studio who’s demanding you finish your movie when you know if you’re nowhere near done? But out of all this adversity came a stone cold classic and it does show that one or two problems causes people to think more imaginatively, to work around the bad stuff and make everything sing.
2. The Director
It seems bizarre now but in 1974 very few people would’ve batted an eyelid if you said the name Steven Spielberg. He was pretty much an unknown quantity. Just a kid who’s made one or two moderately small pictures and then got saddled with this weird thing about a killer shark.
And he didn’t have any idea how he was going to do it either! But something told him he should. Maybe it was that his ther movie ‘Duel’ had four letters and ‘Jaws’ had four letters and as he later recounted ‘it was like Jaws was this sort of sequel to Duel.’
And that was as far as his reasoning and logic took him…
Spielberg was 26 when he shot Jaws and while he’s made many superb pictures since then, big crowd pleasers and historical epics that have stunned the world, just possibly Jaws is his best. It might not seem fair but if you take into account the problems with Bruce, the lack of support from the studio, the unfinished script, his young age and his inexperience with big movies, it’s a thing of wonder.
1. The head, the tail. the whole damn thing!
This one’s a bit personal really but whenever I sit down to watch Jaws, it’s not just the shark or the music or the actors or clever editing that gets me. It’s THE WHOLE DAMN THING. When I watch ET, I laugh and cry. If I see Jurassic Park I marvel at how he reinvented special effects and also made a movie that even after 29 years easily outstrips every sequel that followed. Then onto Raiders of the Lost Ark with that whip-cracking score, proper death defying stunts, a real movie star in the lead (although not quite at that time) and once again characters you properly rooted for. With all these titans of the silver screen (and that’s not even including Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List) on your CV, you’re obviously doing pretty damn good. You know your craft and how every piece slots together. And Spielberg learnt that skill on Jaws. he took the pieces, made sure the edges were perfectly smoothed down and knew exactly where they would go to form a complete masterpiece. The atmosphere of Jaws with the brash fashion of the 70s, the big cars, the smoking, the minutiae of family life and those sunny, expectant days you occasionally get at the very start of the summer holidays when you’re a kid is all up there on the screen. I’ve said it before an I’ll damn well say it again, JAWS IS NOT JUST A HORROR MOVIE. It’s a melodrama, a comedy and thriller, a war movie, a political satire and a struggle between internal and external fear in the soul of one ill-at-ease Chief of Police stuck on the mast of a sinking tub that was never up to the job, armed with an old WW2 M1 Carbine and (until the shark ate it) a pole with a spike on the end!
There is so much in Jaws, so many little details that have been missed here, it will always be - for me - the greatest movie ever made.
Words by Tim Armitage
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