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Posted on 06/20/2025 8:38:44 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Fifty years of the summer blockbuster.
“Amity Island had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. It was the perfect feeding ground.”
On June 20, 1975, moviegoers lined up to see a new picture, a pulpy horror movie about a shark. And it delivered, offering popcorn-spilling jump-scares as the shark leapt up on the screen. The pulsing score, by John Williams, tapped into the viewer’s fear centers, implying menace better than any movie theme since Psycho.
The premise of Jaws fits easily into a genre of vacation-spot-ruined-by-sudden-threat, whether it be birds descending on Bodega Bay or Jason Voorhees appearing at Camp Crystal Lake. And like such films, it has many possible interpretations.
Some see it as a parable of governmental failure: the villain is not the shark, but rather the stupid and venal mayor who doesn’t want to close the beach. Or is it a caution against beachside promiscuity? Or a punishment for environmental depredation? Whatever the reading, the shark itself has no moral agency; thus, it becomes the absence of meaning around which the human characters move.
In October 2021, I visited London to see a new play: The Shark Is Broken by Ian Shaw, the son of Jaws actor Robert Shaw. The younger Shaw played his father and, joined by two castmates as Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss, portrayed the behind-the-scenes time-killing on the set. The delays with the animatronic shark meant they had plenty of time to shoot the breeze on the model boat, as production stretched for weeks over schedule. Shaw agonizes over his tax situation. Dreyfuss is at turns arrogant and neurotic; this was one of his first movies. Scheider, an accomplished television and theater actor, emerges as the mediator between the two personalities. After many...
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
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“Jaws” is showing tonight on NBC....
My takeaway was bigger boats are better.
This movie had outstanding actors and the script was superb...one of the b3st films ever made which is why you can watch it many,many times over.
As a City Administrator, I have always told my staff to watch this movie. It is a great example of how elected public officials make poor decisions, and blame staff, which then empowers the public’s hate of government.
Great movie, but the shark model was a joke.
There were a lot of interesting subplots left out of the movie from the book. An example was the strong description of the carnal act between Matt Hooper and Brody’s wife Ellen.
wy69
I read once that they were having so much trouble with the model that they had to shoot most of the movie without it. That's why you never see the shark until two-thirds of the way through. Fortuitously enough, the delay in showing the shark builds the forboding. By the time you see the shark model you don't care how cheesy it is because it has already scared the Obama out of you.
I remember seeing it in the early 1980s at a school’s Saturday afternoon movie event. The Ben Gardiner scene certainly spooked me that good bit.
Cycle of 1980s and late 1970s movies that got made after the box-office success Jaws (1975).
The films include that movie’s three sequels, Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983), and Jaws: The Revenge (1987), Orca (1977), Piranha (1978), Tentacles (1977), Killer Fish (1979), Barracuda (1978), Tintorera: Killer Shark (1977), Blood Beach (1980), Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), The Last Shark (1981), Up from the Depths (1979), Humanoids from the Deep (1980), The Island of the Fishmen (1979), Devil Fish (1984), and Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976).
...:carnal act between Matt Hooper and Brody’s wife Ellen.”
...that would’ve been weird and added an hour.
I read the book and found it typical 70s fair. A bunch of boring, unpleasant people bed hoping and being jerks for no real reason while a shark picked them off.
The movie was interesting because the people on the screen were interesting. They were not always nice but they were interesting.
To this day still love this movie…one of my favorites. Great scenes, great writing, great acting. No sleaze, no perversions, no idiotic woke. How many times do you get all that in movies these days?
Jaws is a well-done, well-construced movie, but the USS Indianapolis scene is just brilliant, both in Shaw’s performance and for the way it heightens the tension
My father took us to see this movie on our summer vacation to Corpus Christi when it came out, none of us but my father ever went into the water that summer.
To this day he still thinks it was the funniest thing ever.
When the movie came out, a surfer off the coast of Santa Barbara in a wet suit was “swallowed” by a great white shark and then spit out.
His wet suit was torn to shreds, and he had some nasty gashes
on his legs. He was interviewed in his hospital bed.
The Los Angeles Times had a massive headline reporting the event, the headline the size they would have used if World War III had broken out.
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