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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE UNDENIABLE GREATNESS OF JAWS  
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Eileen Jones
July 24, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Jaws is rightly celebrated as a landmark, generation-defining hit.
But it’s not sufficiently recognized as a great 1970s film,
exemplifying that rocky decade’s political ire, acerbic social
critique, and the lingering practices of realist cinema movi _

Jaws is a real 1970s film, made when the angry, assertive social
justice politics of the era still infused the culture and the movies.
(Universal), (Universal)

 

here are a number of striking revelations in the documentary _Jaws @
50: The Definitive Inside Story_ that’s currently on Hulu in honor
of the fiftieth anniversary of the release of _Jaws,_ Steven
Spielberg’s masterpiece of oceangoing terror. But the most
delightful is that Fidel Castro read the source material, Peter
Benchley’s same-named bestselling novel, and made this appreciative
comment: “It’s a marvelous metaphor for the corruption of
capitalism.”

For many years, leftists on social media have viewed the movie in this
light, especially by expressing their affection for Murray
Hamilton’s performance as the smarmy and ruthless mayor of Amity,
the Massachusetts tourist town where a monstrous great white shark
feeding on local swimmers threatens to ruin the summer tourist trade.
The character of Mayor Larry Vaughn is applicable to so many
situations in the United States. Every time another governmental
authority figure sacrifices the well-being of citizens for the sake of
the “bigger financial picture,” which is every day of our lives,
we can trot out Murray Hamilton as the mayor for quick satirical
commentary on the perverse earthly hell we’re burning in.

“Those beaches will be open on Fourth of July,” the mayor orders
the beleaguered police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), overriding
any concern for human welfare. And indeed, the beaches are open and
crowded, but the beachgoers are afraid to take a dip in the water, so
the mayor personally starts herding them in lest the photo ops look
odd and the tourist dollars stop flowing. “Remember, as you know,
Amity means friendship,” he says reassuringly to a TV reporter,
grinning his empty-eyed politician’s grin.

That’s the shark we know, the human-shark, one of the many that
dominate American life. The shark we don’t know — or didn’t, in
1975 — is Spielberg’s “perfect eating machine,” the rarely
glimpsed great white that fills us with atavistic terror. But we get
its underwater shark’s-eye view of all that vulnerable human flesh
kicking and splashing near the surface as John Williams’s ominous
two-note theme sounds the warning of imminent bloody attack.

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The formal power of Jaws represents Steven Spielberg at his zenith.
(Universal)

_Jaws_ is a real 1970s film, made when the angry, assertive social
justice politics of the era still infused the culture and the movies.
“It was the turbulent time of the Vietnam War and Watergate,” as
Spielberg noted of the backdrop to making _Jaws._ The “New
Hollywood” cinema of the 1960s to ’70s was influenced by European
art films movements like Italian neorealism and the French New Wave,
the radical cinema of liberation known as Third Cinema — centered in
Latin American countries but meant to represent a three-continent
struggle for postcolonial freedom in Latin America, Africa, and Asia
— and the underground and experimental cinema flourishing in the
United States as well as internationally. The combined strength of
those influences had their effect on mainstream commercial films of
that era, which were often surprisingly daring in both content and
style. Young filmmakers who had strong political views were given
unprecedented access to studio projects because, at a time when the
old studio system was on its last legs, hiring them was a desperate
final gambit to hang onto “the youth audience.”

_Jaws_ is a real 1970s film, made when the angry, assertive social
justice politics of the era still infused the culture and the movies.

So Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Hal
Ashby, Michael Cimino, and many other directors were given a
remarkably free hand and a shot at auteur status. Though Spielberg was
terrified that he was going to be fired as the _Jaws_ shoot ran way
over schedule and over budget — mainly because the mechanical shark
didn’t work and “everything shot on water takes twice as long”
— he wasn’t. He was given tremendous creative leeway. The script
was being rewritten during production, as Spielberg collaborated with
additional screenwriters on the script generated by Peter Benchley and
Carl Gottlieb and incorporated the input of the three lead actors, who
were improvising dialogue and bits of business generated among
themselves in a competitive fury behind the scenes.

For example, Robert Shaw as Quint, the hardcase captain of
the _Orca_, ad-libbed the bit when he finishes his beer and crushes
the can with one hand, which was mockingly answered by Richard
Dreyfuss as wealthy, academically trained oceanographer Hooper
finishing his coffee and crushing the Styrofoam cup with one hand.

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Jaws is rightly celebrated as a landmark, generation-defining hit that
launched the career of the preeminent popular director of the American
film industry and continues to thrill viewers with its propulsive
narrative and formal dynamism. (Universal)

The legendary fact-based USS_ Indianapolis_ monologue delivered by
Shaw as Quint was another last-minute inspiration, with screenwriter
Howard Sackler suggesting that Quint needed a motive for his vengeful
pursuit of the great white. John Milius then wrote a seven- or
eight-page monologue, and Shaw took it home to edit it down to the
much more compact version he delivers in the film. It’s the
harrowing tale of Quint’s experience as a
USS _Indianapolis_ seaman after the ship delivered parts of the atom
bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and was subsequently sunk by Japanese
torpedoes. Eleven hundred men went into the water, but only 316
survived the sharks’ feeding frenzy that followed.

It’s impossible to forget some of the ghastly details of that
speech: The revelation that the bomb-delivering mission was so top
secret, no distress signal was ever sent to save the men. The friend
of Quint’s who’s clinging onto floating refuse and seems to be
sleeping but, when touched, bobs up and down weightlessly in the water
because a shark has bitten his body in half. The eyes of a shark seen
up close by Quint, who describes them as “lifeless eyes. Black eyes.
Like a doll’s eyes.”

And that final bleak and sardonic line of Quint’s, said with
Shaw’s disturbing grin: “Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

It’s clear that the enormous difficulties of making_ Jaws_ pushed
young Spielberg beyond his limits as a filmmaker, as he himself
attests in _Jaws @ 50_, saying he had belated panic attacks about the
film even after it premiered and became such a record-breaking
success. It was the main film hit of the 1970s, besides _The
Godfather_, _The Exorcist_, and _Star Wars_, to dictate the terms of
a new blockbuster-based, relentlessly commercial business model in
Hollywood that ended a decade of New Hollywood auteur-based
experimentation. These changes in the business operations of the
American film industry are strangely omitted in the documentary.

For years afterward, Spielberg woke up in a cold sweat from nightmares
about still being in production on _Jaws. _He found relief from
lingering filmmaker PTSD by periodically going after hours to
the _Orca_ set, preserved at Universal Studios, to weep while
sitting in the leatherette booth where Quint told the
USS _Indianapolis_ story, “the thing I’m proudest of
in _Jaws_.”

The formal power of the film represents Spielberg at his zenith. His
deployment of the dolly zoom, an extreme and rarely used Alfred
Hitchcock camera technique invented for _Vertigo_, to convey
Brody’s horror when the Kintner boy is attacked by the great white,
is beyond all praise. But even subtler shots are wonderful, like the
threatening dominance of the ocean in widescreen shots of the
water-phobic Brody early in the film. Working with Verna Fields,
Spielberg’s cut of the film moves with extraordinary rhythmic
feeling and precision. It’s almost impossible to watch any sequence
in _Jaws_ without becoming engrossed again, no matter how many times
you’ve seen it.

Attesting to its brilliance are many directors interviewed in _Jaws @
50_, including Jordan Peele, Guillermo del Toro, George Lucas, Cameron
Crowe, Emily Blunt, Robert Zemeckis, and James Cameron. Steven
Soderbergh is shown wearing his vintage fanboy _Jaws _T-shirt,
claiming to have seen the film thirty-one times _in the
theater, _and saying that _Jaws_ inspired him to consider becoming
a director himself.

The stylistic greatness of _Jaws_ earned him the spot-on tribute
from Pauline Kael
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her review, noting that, at last, film had thrown off the last
vestiges of its entertainment predecessor, the theater. While so many
other directors remained strangely stage-bound in their imaginations,
Spielberg created immersive three-dimensional shots such as those amid
panicked beach crowds. They indicated, as Kael quotes an unnamed
“older director” saying, “He must never have seen a play; he’s
the first one of us who doesn’t think in terms of the proscenium
arch. With him, there’s nothing but the camera lens.”

In Spielberg’s struggle with the arduous pressures of production, he
worked more inventively and arrived at more rough-hewn and startling
filmic effects than he ever would again. And that 1970s political
climate played a big part in giving _Jaws_ its unusual edginess,
which disappeared from his subsequent movies, no matter how
successful, slickly realized, and highly praised. What other Spielberg
film would ever draw the majority of its cast from the local
citizenry? _Jaws_ is practically a neorealist throwback in its
location setting and use of nonprofessional actors, with only eight
lead actors brought from Hollywood while all the other performers were
drawn from the small Martha’s Vineyard population.

Interviewed in _Jaws @ 50_, Jeffrey Voorhees, the boy who played
doomed Alex Kintner, said he wasn’t spooked by playing a shark
attack victim because he was more afraid of “freezing my
twelve-year-old ass off” in the frigid Atlantic waters in May, when
the shoot began. And Jonathan Filley, the young man whose fireside
flirtation with a young woman led to the run down the beach to go
night-swimming that provided the great white with its first victim,
attested to the way Spielberg accepted the input of even minor local
actors appearing in _Jaws._ Filley objected to the bell-bottomed
pants and other excessively hippie-eish garments he was being asked to
wear as a costume and was allowed to wear his own ordinary khaki pants
and pale blue Oxford shirt instead.

 

Spielberg was a made man at age twenty-nine, after his two films of
raw stripped-down desperation, _Duel_ (1971) and _Jaws,_ which
gave him cause for worry that he might get typed forever as the
“truck and shark guy.” But after the 1980s, Spielberg was ever
more a man of the Reagan era. An incredibly gifted and facile
director, he tended toward comparatively safe-playing entertainments
with less and less leakage in them representing the turmoil of the
times. His mirroring of the dominant culture even as it shifted
radically is one reason why Steven Spielberg is still a top hitmaking
director fifty years later. And that’s definitely not covered in the
documentary.

_Jaws_ is rightly celebrated as a landmark, generation-defining hit
that launched the career of the preeminent popular director of the
American film industry and continues to thrill viewers with its
propulsive narrative and formal dynamism. But it’s not sufficiently
recognized as a great 1970s film, exemplifying that rocky decade’s
political ire, acerbic social critique, and the lingering
collaborative practices of realist cinema movements that have largely
died out of mainstream filmmaking since then.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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* jaws
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* Steven Spielberg
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* 1970s
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* realist cinema
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* social justice
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