The small beach-side town of Amity is a big tourist draw. Every summer thousands of visitors descend there for rest and relaxation in the sun and sand. This summer, though, a new visitor has arrived in the form of an enormous man-eating great white shark.
The town's prospects for a good summer are endangered when Brody (ROY SCHEIDER) a former big city cop and now the local sheriff, finds the remains of a college girl and orders the beaches closed. Mayor Vaughan (MURRAY HAMILTON) and other city officials, however, rescind that order for fear of what it will do to the town's tourism.
Brody and his wife Ellen (LORRAINE GARY) don't think that was the right thing to do and worry about the safety of their two boys. After several more people are killed by the shark, Brody closes the beaches and brings in Hooper (RICHARD DREYFUSS), an oceanographic expert, to help find the shark.
In the end, however, they need Quint (ROBERT SHAW), the local, grizzled "old man of the sea" to hunt down and kill the shark. The three men then head out into open waters and bait, and wait, for their encounter with the dangerous shark.
The granddaddy of the summer blockbuster film, this "must see" feature of 1975 is every bit as suspenseful and entertaining as it was then. Of course not everyone thought it would be a big hit -- in fact, many people thought it would be a flop, what with "Bruce" the mechanical shark and the reported shooting difficulties they had with it.
Yet those problems actually helped the production as they forced director Steven Spielberg to resort to different, and much more effective techniques to make a masterfully suspenseful film. Based on the Peter Benchley novel, the film jettisoned much of the book's subplots and deeper characterizations, leaving a lean and powerful story.
The film works so much better than most of today's "monster" films because we rarely see the shark. This causes the audience's imagination to work as hard as the director does, and when combined the two forces create a powerful film.
Of course, that wasn't Spielberg's initial plan, yet the other parts of his direction are first-rate, with effectively imaginative shot choices, pacing and editing. The use of "pass by" editing (where a person passes by and blocks the foreground, leaving a new shot after they pass by) is something you rarely see anymore and makes the film visually fun to watch.
Likewise, Spielberg uses deft touches such as a scene where Brody's young son imitates his dad's movements, to impart fine little characterizations. While it was the first true blockbuster, "Jaws" was made in an era when strongly developed characters and plot ruled, not special effects and shallow extravaganzas that you see in today's films.
What are most impressive are the performances that are something you'll likewise not find in most current summer movies. As a matter of fact, the most notable and effective scene doesn't involve the shark, but instead focuses on the three main characters trading "war" stories and scars.
Robert Shaw's moving account of a doomed WWII ship and its survivors' encounters with sharks is more spellbinding and powerful than any other scene in this, or many other movies. Shaw is impressive in his role as the grizzled sea veteran and easily commands the screen whenever he appears, but Dreyfuss and Scheider aren't slouches either.
This film briefly turned all of those actors into big stars, and for the next few years, they headlined many of the more noteworthy movies of the day. Of course, the biggest star of the film was Bruce the shark. When compared to recent computer generated effects and realistic animatronics, the shark looks even more fake today than it did then.
Still, the film survives the ending scenes where the shark is seen in full since we've been drawn deep into the story, and the horror of the attack is as much in our heads as it is on the screen. Probably Spielberg's most impressive film of his early career (the other one being "Close Encounters"), this is a fabulous feature that most of today's directors, including Spielberg himself, should be forced to watch to learn (or relearn) how to make compelling features.
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