Jaws Review

The famous production story is the useful one. The mechanical shark did not work, so Spielberg shot around it, and the withholding turned a creature feature into a suspense machine. A yellow barrel breaking the surface does more than any prosthetic could, and John Williams supplies the rest with two notes. What gets undersold is how good the middle hour is as human comedy. Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw play three men who dislike each other in specific ways, and the scar comparison scene, improvised into shape on the day, is the reason the Indianapolis speech that follows can land at all.

The town politics of the first act are sharper than the genre required, with a mayor who is less a villain than a man protecting a season's takings. Verna Fields cuts it ruthlessly and the picture runs two hours without a slack stretch. Its commercial legacy, the wide release and the saturation advertising and everything that followed, gets held against it, which is unfair to a film made with this much care. Fifty years on it is still the standard every creature picture is measured against and almost none reach.