First Take Classics: Jaws - the sharks are circling, the water’s getting clearer…

SYNOPSIS: When a massive killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community off Long Island, it’s up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.

50 years ago last weekend Steven Spielberg unleashed the first of the true ‘summer’ blockbuster movies upon the world, and it is genuinely hard to think of a cinema industry that didn’t have the Jaws franchise come into existence. More than just a film, this series changed the way that films go into cinemas, how they are promoted, and so much more - so while we haven’t had Jaws 19 as prophecised in Back to the Future: Part II… now is as good of a time as any to look back at one of the most prolific films ever put in cinemas.

For the time it was made, Spielberg was able to do a LOT to make this film as spinechilling as he could, clocking in at 2 hours 4 minutes it is all killer, no filler, which is all the more impressive considering the well documented struggles they had filming it - to quote Richard Dreyfuss, “we started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark”. Once they found a shark (both real and mechanical), and got the script inspired by the book by Peter Benchley finished, shaped by the author himself and Carl Gottlieb, while it doesn’t follow the plot beat for beat, it still has enough tension to make the ending that we do get feel properly terror inducing for those experiencing the film for the first ever time. It is shot brilliantly by Bill Butler, and of course you then have the John Williams score. So iconic, so menacing, and so recognisable that it works anywhere, even a packed Salford Community Stadium (because of course my friends over at Sale play the main theme just before they let Ben Curry and the boys loose on a home matchday). Two notes is all you need to not only make you think of the film but set the scene for anything where sharks may indeed be swimming.

When casting the film, Spielberg went with big names but not relatively well known ones at the time - and I think we can safely say that Roy Schieder, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss certainly became well known after the first screenings. They sell this film, they make it believable, and in the final act especially, they do it in a way that even in a CGI age, feels at home on a big screen (or a 3D reissue as they’ve done in the past). Supporting them is Louise Gary, Carl Gottlieb, Murray Hamilton, Jeffrey Kramer, and a wider cast who just understood the assignment and then some - while some elements haven’t aged as well as others in a modern day cinema context, the film still holds up, it still delivers tension, suspense, fear and more, and of course, it made everyone realise that mechanical sharks called Bruce can sometimes complicate filming (making many people glad CGI exists now).

The impact Jaws had in 1975 understandably set the industry standard until Covid - the idea of the saturation release, where a distributor books every possible screen available to play the film for a fixed window with a marketing campaign to match… it’s still something in place to this day. And nothing says how pioneering it was like the marketing itself - usually we have the modern day trailer on the reviews, but it’s worth sticking the original teaser trailer on here too just to show off how on the ball they were back then. Imagine how audiences must’ve felt seeing this on-screen for the first time 50 years ago!

THE VERDICT

It’s surprising that there wasn’t a formal reissue here in England, because many people haven’t had the chance to see it on a big screen where it belongs - but this film set off many careers, a whole franchise, and made a whole generation scared to go to the beach. Sometimes the best ideas really are the simple ones, after all, because two years later a little known movie called Alien was genuinely pitched to studios as “Jaws in space” by Ridley Scott…

RATING: 4/5