The film that took a big bite out of beach business

Rating: 10/10 (6 August 2001)

One of the most traumatic productions in Hollywood history also turned out to be one of Hollywood's greatest masterpieces of terror. JAWS is often blamed (wrongly, I think) for starting this obsession Hollywood has with blockbuster hits. I say "wrongly blamed", because, besides grossing a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office (the first film to do so), JAWS is really a very great movie.
The story itself is familiar: a New England coastal resort town terrorized by a Great White shark, a mayor unwilling to put his town's economy at risk so that the shark can be killed, etcetera, etcetera. The problems they had with the mechanical shark are even more familiar. But the fact remains that JAWS works, because Steven Spielberg has never been the kind to let go of a vision he is in the process of making into his own--and this was no exception. Instead of making it into a visceral monster movie, Spielberg took to not showing the shark for the first two-thirds of the movie (although the fact that he had very little choice had more than a little to do with it), thus mandating an Alfred Hitchcock approach to things. He is helped by the excellent performances of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss, as well as John Williams' classic score. The score, Verna Fields' editing, and the production sound team of John Carter and Robert Hoyt won Oscars for their work.
And of course one must thank Spielberg for having delivered a truly terrifying and dramatic piece of cinema, and not just an ARMAGEDDON-style sound-and-fury event. JAWS, even after a quarter century-plus of being sequalized, parodied, and ripped off, is still a Hollywood masterpiece.