Old Movie Review: “Jaws”

(Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a Peter Benchley novel)

I saw the movie “Jaws” a couple of nights ago. It was the first time I’d watched it beginning to end in years. The first time I saw it I was in 1975. I was 9 years old and I stood in a line with my folks and 7-year-old brother that stretched around the block of the theater. It was the movie everyone saw that summer and everyone talked about, and it spawned the summer blockbuster. (Caution: more fish metaphors ahead.)

Even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know the plot: a 25-foot great white shark menaces a New England island resort during the peak fourth-of-July tourist season. (Are you sure you want to go to the beach this summer?) You probably also know the iconic scene of fisherman Quint (played by Richard Shaw) scraping his fingernails across the chalkboard to get the attention of the squabbling town folk and the unforgettable duh-dun duh-dun dudududu music that cues the shark.

It doesn’t take much for director Steven Spielberg to hook the audience on the story and reel them in. Suspending disbelief is easy because everyone knows that sharks do, on occasion, attack ocean swimmers and surfers. (Hey, what was that touching your leg in the water? A rope of seaweed? A jellyfish? A shark fin?)

The story is more than a two-hour feeding frenzy. A new sheriff fresh from New York City confronts an entrenched town council more concerned with making money over the July 4th holiday than the safety of the mainland tourists descending on the island. Trying to do the right thing when you are a fish out of water isn’t easy. Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) is swimming upstream; the mayor wants to keep the shark attacks quiet; no one wants to starve in the winter because the tourists stayed away all summer.

Yet Brody persists and Spielberg builds the suspense. Brody calls in a nerdy shark specialist, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and hires Quint to track down the shark and kill it. During the voyage, and while the shark stalks the three men, Quint captivates Brody and Hooper with his gruesome, first-hand account of sharks devouring his crewmates of the sinking U.S.S. Indianapolis, the ship that delivered parts for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. It is as spooky as any ghost story you’ve ever heard and all the more frightening because it is true.

Stomach-churning gore is kept to a minimum. Spielberg accomplishes the storytelling mostly by hinting at the shark’s location and through the controlled terror of Brody, Hooper, and Quint struggling to keep a leaky boat operational long enough to kill the monstrous predator before it kills them.

I’m sure part of why I like the movie is remembering the experience of seeing it for the first time, but if you like suspense or Spielberg, you’ll likely enjoy it, too. Put it in your cue, if you’ve got one, or find it on HBO during the month of February 2009.