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On the 50th Anniversary of Its Release, ‘Jaws’ Holds a Surprising Message for Us: Movies Should Feel Real
Fifty years after its release, Steven Spielberg's formative blockbuster looks more than ever like a New Hollywood fusion of Hitchcock and Altman.
Then again, it’s worth asking how true that really is in a ’70s movie culture that had already given us such boffo bonanzas as “The Towering Inferno” and “Billy Jack” and “The Sting” and “The Exorcist” and “The Getaway” and “Shaft” and “The Last House on the Left” and “The Longest Yard” and “Herbie Rides Again” and “Willard” and “Summer of ’42” and “The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams” and “Freebie and the Bean” and “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” I’d argue that “Jaws” is no more “high concept,” no more decadently “escapist,” than any of those films. The opening sunset beach party now plays like a free-flowing anticipation of “Dazed and Confused,” and in the morning-after scene, set in the home of Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the new police chief of Amity, you can feel how much “Jaws” was directed by a filmmaker who wasn’t rich yet; he still knew what it felt like to wake up in an ordinary house. It’s all spontaneous and organic, from the firing of the harpoons attached to yellow barrels to how the infrastructure of the boat slowly starts to come apart to the undersea cage face-off to the way that Quint slides, inexorably, into the shark’s mouth, as if karma had decided he belonged there.
Or read this on Variety