"Swims up and bites you on the ass"

Rating: 8/10 (7 August 2010)

Blockbuster is a bit of a dirty word in "serious" film commentary. It gets associated with base commercialism, the motion picture as mere product, simple fare with no long-term appeal. But such an assessment does a disservice to the savvy filmmakers who make the hits, as well as the movie-going public who make the box office figures. You can fake art house sophistication, but you can't fake popular approval.
Jaws was adapted by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb from Benchley's best-selling novel. In many ways it follows the book closely, but there are some key differences. In the novel the mayor was being pressured by the mafia, and bizarrely enough there was a subplot in which Hooper has an affair with Brody's wife. With these aspects gone we have a story stripped of anything that may introduce a different tone - anything that might have been the focus of another story in its own right. The plot and dialogue are succinct and direct, especially in the earlier scenes. This is not a picture that wastes time getting itself going.
And a lot of the racy pacing is down to director Steven Spielberg. Like John Ford before him, Spielberg has great economy of expression, often working two ideas into a single shot. In Roy Scheider's first scene, we get Scheider on the phone in the foreground while his wife tends to their son's injured hand in the background. The details of the phone call aren't important, we just need to know that it happened, and thus Spielberg can afford to balance it with something that demonstrates the significance of our hero's family life. The tenderness Scheider feels towards his two boys is the closest this picture comes to having a subplot, and it is something largely brought out by Spielberg. For example, scenes like the one in which the younger son imitates Scheider's every move were improvised at the director's behest.
But more than conciseness, Jaws has dynamism and punch. Like another ace director of the previous generation, Victor Fleming, Spielberg encourages performances that really move. Take a scene like Richard Dreyfuss's inspection of the first victim. Rather than a professional study, the scene is staged like a heated argument, the actors waving their arms and snapping out their lines. Almost always there is movement – characters walk as they talk, or stand before a busy crowd. The few moments of stillness – Scheider with his family, the stirring Indianapolis speech – are those of subtle significance, and their calmness helps them stand out.
Of course Spielberg didn't operate in a vacuum. The invigorating style of Jaws is aided immensely by the tight editing of Verna Fields. Fields uses techniques of the art film – jump cuts, rapid edits – but with the difference that her use of them is purely functional, never attention-grabbing or stylistic, and as such she disguises her cuts to make them blend in like finest mise-en-scene. Take the beach scene where Scheider scans the seascape, fearful of another shark attack. Most of the cuts take place as an extra walks across the screen, softening them so that we barely realise the angles are changing.
And it all works of course. Take this kind of professionalism, and you can make an exciting, box-office busting thriller about a shark, a dinosaur, a killer truck or whatever. This is why, when all those rip-off shark flicks began to appear (and I don't just mean the Jaws sequels – the more recent Shark Attack franchise makes the Jaws offshoots look like masterpieces) they were invariably awful. They took the premise, killer-sharks-versus-humans, thinking that alone could make a hit. These are the true lowest-common-denominator cash-in trash. If a movie gets audiences flocking in to see it in phenomenal numbers, it surely must be a high-quality piece of entertainment.