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Forty years ago today, Steven Spielberg scared the hell out of audiences across America with his breakthrough film, Jaws. The classic film follows the residents of Amity Island, who are stalked by a giant great white shark, and the three men who hunt for the underwater monster — Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw). The film was an immediate box-office hit, and completely changed the film industry forever.
While many film historians consider Jaws to be the first summer blockbuster movie, changing the way event films are released and marketed during the warmer months, it’s almost incomparable to the big-budget action-adventure films that hit multiplexes today. For one thing, it was shot on a $9 million budget — a paltry sum compared to the average studio film today, even if you take inflation into consideration. And that only makes its $470.7 million international box office return even more impressive.
But beyond its concept and massive box-office success, what sets Jaws apart from the average summer blockbuster is its style and tone. The film features that classic and often-parodied score from John Williams, which is drastically simple yet incredibly effective. Also impressive is the gritty camera work that’s both shocking and subtle; Spielberg doesn’t give away too much throughout the film; the audience doesn’t even seen the predatory shark until half-way through the film. Jaws instead unfolds slowly, with its aquatic villain lurking below the surface (at times we even get to see its own perspective before we know for sure what the monster actually looks like), causing havoc and chowing down on its victims before its evil appearance appears above the water. Because Jaws doesn’t deliver a complete onslaught of grotesque scares and gore, instead relying on its characters’ frightened faces to create tension on film, the film achieves a Hitchcockian-level amount of anxiety to leave its audience as unsettled as the actors on film.
In a time when directors rely on flashy special effects and watered-down scripts to churn out blockbusters to passive and jaded audiences, Jaws seems just as masterful and terrifying as it did forty years ago. It’s Spielberg’s work as a director that has had the longest lasting legacy of the Jaws crew (the film spawned three particularly awful sequels, as most surprising hit films often do). At the time, Jaws bucked all of the Hollywood formulas; four decades later, however, you can see its influence on nearly every film of its kind: the stock characters, the comforting all-American setting, and the unrepentant, seemingly omnipotent monster. But what’s more impressive is that it cannot be completely recreated or repurposed — it’s not just the prototype for the summer blockbuster, it’s also the standard for the modern cinematic thriller.
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Photos: Everett Collection
