The text in front of you is not a review, because there is no point in writing a review of a film that came out 47 years ago and changed the face of cinema. Now Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” returns to the big screens under the title “Come experience the first blockbuster in the cinema”, to remind us what was missing in most of the blockbusters that came after it. When I first watched it as a child I was mostly concerned with whether I was scared or not, and whether the shark was convincing or not. I remember my surprise many years later, when I sat down to watch it after studying cinema, and discovered that it was a stunning masterpiece. I arrived at the press screening at IMAX already prepared for a reunion with a great film, and I experienced pure pleasure. I sent my five stars to the “time” table even before.
“Jaws” and “I.T.” Returning to the cinemas because of the corona effect. A drop of about thirty percent in films ready for the screens resulted in a thin summer crop, and space was freed up. Until the 1980s, it was common to re-release old and beloved movies to theaters. This custom stopped almost completely in the DVD and streaming era, and I hope that this wonderful duo will have enough box office success to renew the custom. Because even though “Jaws” works great at home as well, there’s nothing like experiencing it in a giant. In the US, “Jaws” was even converted to 3D, which received good reviews, but in Israel we receive it in its original version. In the following lines, I would like to refer to some elements of the film’s themes and cinematic language. This includes spoilers, but they are not essential, because everyone knows that this is a story about A huge shark that preys on people in front of a beach town that makes a living from summer tourism, and that ends up killing it.
“What a bad hat Harry”
One of the famous scenes in the film comes in the 13th minute. People are bathing in the sea and only police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), who is sitting on the beach, knows that there is a good chance that there is a shark in the water. He tried to close the beaches, but the mayor prevented him from doing so. The scene is filmed through the eyes of Brody, whose gaze is focused on the water – as long as he sees what is happening, he is, seemingly, in control. The scene is a masterpiece of editing and of building and relaxing tension (I teach it in a film expression course), but there is something else worth noting.
Except for Brody and his family, there are masses of statisticians on the beach. One of them is the boy Alex who will be devoured at the end of the scene in front of the bathers, leaving his mother confused by the sight of his tattered bath mattress. Just before that we will get a hint of the presence of the shark through the disappearance of a dog that was swimming in the water. The rest of the characters in the scene serve as decoys, and as barriers in Brody’s field of vision. When you watch carefully, you find that all the characters that are related to the shark’s narrative are marked in yellow. The t-shirt of the boy playing with the dog, the towel of the old man whose gray hat tricks us into thinking he is a shark, Alex’s mattress, his mother’s hat – they are all yellow. Yellow is also the color of the floating barrels that mark the location of the shark, and of the police cars in the town.
It is a warning color, and in the above scene it suggestively marks us the role of the characters that we do not know beyond their few seconds on the screen. Together they are like making up one entity, so when Alex’s mother looks for him, it breaks the heart. As I recall, Spielberg worked A similar trick of color in the ghetto evacuation scene in “Schindler’s List”, where the red coat of one girl, in a crowd filmed in black and white, focuses us on her and her fate, and serves as an image for Schindler’s awakening conscience, who watches the evacuation from afar.
“Anyway, we delivered the bomb”
After the shark attacks the tourists who came to celebrate the Fourth of July, in the second half of the film three men go out to sea to hunt it. Oceanographer Matt Hopper (Richard Dreyfuss) and shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw in a terrific performance) compare battle scars, then Quint cracks a story about his first encounter with sharks. For about four minutes, this high-adrenaline film stops engines and stops to listen to it.
The story Quint tells is the real truth – you can find the full details on Wikipedia. In World War II, he served on the battleship Indianapolis, which in July 1945 brought the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima to the island of Tinian. Immediately after completing the mission, two Japanese torpedo bombs hit the ship. She sank, and most of the crew were eaten by sharks. The rescue was delayed because, due to the secrecy of the mission, the Indianapolis did not broadcast distress signals. “1,100 people fell into the water, 316 got out. The sharks took the rest,” concludes Quint. “In any case, we delivered the bomb.”
The connection between the monstrous shark, which does not behave as expected of its kind, and the atomic bomb, raises a direct association with the Japanese Godzilla films from the 1950s. As we know, the prehistoric sea monster was deciphered as a consequence of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan during the war, and also as their allegory. While Quint became a shark hunter to take revenge on the creatures that devoured his friends, it seems that the shark of mythological proportions has arrived to complete his revenge on the people who brought the bomb to Japan. And it is no coincidence that he does this precisely on the day when the Americans celebrate their independence.
“You’ll need a bigger boat”
“Jaws”, based on a book by Peter Benchley, is often compared to “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. Like Captain Ahab who develops an obsession with hunting the enormous whale that the book is named after, so too the shark hunter Quint, who is modeled after a pirate, turns out to be insane as the confrontation with the shark intensifies. But while watching “Jaws” in IMAX, the movie actually reminded me of a western, with Brody in the role of the sheriff (he goes out to sea with a gun in his belt) and the ocean in the role of the desert.
As in westerns, such as John Ford’s “The Searchers” from 1956, it is told here about a group of men who go out into the open spaces (for a monetary reward) to hunt down a murderous villain who threatens the peace of the town (in these westerns, usually bank robbers or Indians). On their journey into the unknown, they pass manhood tests in confrontations with nature and with each other, and in the parking lots they tell stories by the campfire (like the one I described in the previous section).
The soundtrack composed by John Williams contributes to the western atmosphere. Everyone remembers the snarling musical motif that accompanies the shark underwater. But in other parts of the film, which focus on the three men’s confrontation with the shark, the music is quite different. Energetic and uplifting brass instruments bring to mind the cavalry trumpets in Ford’s westerns. In a documentary about Ford, Spielberg tells how he met the revered director in his youth, and he told him “when you come to the conclusion that putting the horizon line at the bottom of the frame or at the top of the frame is better than putting it in the middle of the frame, you might become a good filmmaker.” This lesson is evident in the film, which has frames lifted from Ford westerns, such as the shot of Quint appearing as a shadow against a cloudy sky during a red sunset.
In the end, it is the “sheriff” who is afraid of the water – as the old man with the yellow towel mentioned above points out – is the one who manages to kill the shark, not the two experienced sailors. And he does it with a rifle, not a bell, while riding on the mast of the sunken boat, which looks like the silhouette of a horse. In December 2021, after completing the musical “Suburban Story”, Spielberg said that the only genre he had not yet tackled was the western (the most American genre there is), and that he had several westerns in development. “Who knows, maybe I’ll wear spurs someday, who knows?” he said. But, in fact, he had already created a Western.