 Directed by Academy Award winner Steven Spielberg, Jaws set the standard for edge-of-your-seat suspense quickly becoming a cultural phenomenon and forever changing the movie industry. When the seaside community of Amity finds itself under attack by a dangerous great white shark, the town's chief of police (Roy Scheider), a young marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a grizzled shark hunter (Robert Shaw) embark on a desperate quest to destroy the beast before it strikes again. Featuring an unforgettable score that evokes pure terror, Jaws remains one of the most influential and gripping adventures in motion picture history. Storyline: It's a hot summer on Amity Island, a small community whose main business is its beaches. When new Sheriff Martin Brody discovers the remains of a shark attack victim, his first inclination is to close the beaches to swimmers. This doesn't sit well with Mayor Larry Vaughn and several of the local businessmen. Brody backs down to his regret as that weekend a young boy is killed by the predator. The dead boy's mother puts out a bounty on the shark and Amity is soon swamped with amateur hunters and fisherman hoping to cash in on the reward. A local fisherman with much experience hunting sharks, Quint, offers to hunt down the creature for a hefty fee. Soon Quint, Brody and Matt Hooper from the Oceanographic Institute are at sea hunting the Great White shark. As Brody succinctly surmises after their first encounter with the creature, they're going to need a bigger boat. Written by garykmcd Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman on August 1, 2012 -- Were there "event" summer blockbuster movies before Jaws debuted on what was then a staggering number of screens in late June of 1975? Probably, though you'd be hard pressed to find another film which so seemingly instantaneously captured the public's imagination and raked in so much lucre, not to mention a perhaps unexpected bevy of critical acclaim. Jaws's production had been so famously troubled that even co-star Richard Dreyfuss was by his own admission thinking he had signed on to one of the all time disasters in cinema history. Of course, Dreyfuss had instead hitched his star to one of the most epochal films of its era, and perhaps of all time. It's almost impossible to conceive it now, but Steven Spielberg was hardly a blip on the Hollywood map when he ultimately landed the directorial gig (after at least a couple of others either passed or didn't pass muster with producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown), but Jaws indelibly established Spielberg as one of the cinema masters of his generation. The film is brisk, brilliantly structured (with a sharp screenplay co-written by original novelist Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb), and what was initially thought to be a huge detriment turned out to be one of the film's most salient successes: the special effects crew just couldn't get a realistic looking shark to work properly, and so Spielberg had to invent other ways of suggesting menace. What ensued was a brilliant model of alluding to terror rather than depicting it outright, and Spielberg's "workaround" gives Jaws a lot of its visceral sense of horror. As any psychiatrist worth his or her salt will tell you, your imagination can conjure fears far more "real" than anything mere reality can present to your actual eyes. Is there anyone who actually hasn't seen Jaws? It seems inconceivable, though I've been personally surprised before by comments from readers who have never seen everything from Casablanca to Gone With the Wind to Ben-Hur or even that staple of Easter television broadcasts, The Ten Commandments. So for those uninitiated in the story of the little village of Amity, here goes. Jaws relates the story of Amity's new police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), who has his idyllic summer "working vacation" spoiled when a badly mutilated corpse washed up on Amity's picturesque beach. We've already seen some clues as to what happened to this hapless young woman, and soon Amity's medical examiner is chiming in that she was killed by a shark. The machinations of Amity's business savvy and somewhat desperate Mayor Vaughan (Murray Hamilton in a fantastic supporting performance) keeps Brody's desire to close all of Amity's beaches at bay, until another tragedy strikes. Even then Mayor Vaughan isn't especially well disposed to shutting down Amity's main source of revenue, but soon Brody, a salty seaman named Quint (Robert Shaw) and a young marine biologist named Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) set out in Quint's aging boat Orca to track down and kill the shark. What they encounter is a beast far larger and more vicious than they would have ever thought possible, a creature seemingly intent on exacting revenge. The final third or so of the film is a knock down, drag out fight between the shark and the three men on the boat, with rather evocative echoes of Herman Melville's Moby Dick pinging around the boat deck. Jaws is a film of incredibly impressive set pieces, including the terrifying first sequence alluded to above. Spielberg simply had an inerrant intuition for how to frame scenes in this film, and his wandering tracking shots of swimmers taken from below in the water immediately establish a sense of dread in the viewer that the director revisits time and again throughout the picture. It must be admitted, however, that Spielberg and his team weren't completely able to cover up the kind of patent silliness of their fake shark. While a great deal of the film works beautifully, there are at least a couple of moments where the verisimilitude of the great beast leaves a little bit to be desired, including an admittedly terrifying sequence late in the film dealing with Quint (those who have seen the film will know what this refers to). The film has become at least as famous for John Williams' two note ascending half step motif as it has perhaps for anything actually seen in the film. Rarely have image and music been so seamlessly interwoven, and Williams' score was one of three Academy Awards the film took home that year (the other two were for Verna Fields' brilliant editing and the film's evocative sound done by a quartet of craftsmen). A lot of once iconic films seem to lose at least a little of their luster as the years progress, but Jaws if anything has only grown in stature in the more than 35 years (wow!) since its initial release. It's a rare situation of things coming together near perfectly even as most everyone involved in the film is convinced things are falling apart. Jaws continues to be a near perfect film experience now several decades after its release. Terrifying, disturbing and against considerable odds, often very funny, this film put Spielberg firmly on the map and continues to be one of his defining achievements. There's virtually no element out of place in this brilliantly structured film. Performances and direction are spot on and the technical achievements are for the most part stellar. This Blu-ray is simply stunning in all categories. A top notch restoration and transfer supervised and approved by Spielberg himself are augmented by a bevy of fantastic supplements (though it would have been great to have had a Spielberg commentary on this release). Highly recommended. Cast Notes: Roy Scheider (Brody), Robert Shaw (Quint), Richard Dreyfuss (Hooper), Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody), Murray Hamilton (Vaughn), Carl Gottlieb (Meadows), Jeffrey Kramer (Hendricks [as Jeffrey C. Kramer]), Susan Backlinie (Chrissie), Jonathan Filley (Cassidy), Ted Grossman (Estuary Victim), Chris Rebello (Michael Brody), Jay Mello (Sean Brody), Lee Fierro (Mrs. Kintner), Jeffrey Voorhees (Alex Kintner), Craig Kingsbury (Ben Gardner). IMDb Rating (07/24/14): 8.1/10 from 304,020 users Top 250: #202 IMDb Rating (07/16/12): 8.2/10 from 201,599 users Top 250: #133 IMDb Rating (01/15/10): 8.3/10 from 127,489 users Top 250: #107 IMDb Rating (10/15/07): 8.3/10 from 83,948 users Top 250: #89 IMDb Rating (06/01/01): 8.2/10 from 17,061 users Top 250: #85
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