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Winnipeg Free Press

Opinion: Jaws leaves cinematic legacy in its bloodied-water wake

Opinion Jaws celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. I didn't see Steven Spielberg's carefully constructed, unexpectedly understated creature feature when it came out in theatres in 1975. My parents considered it too scary for kids. Later in life, I made up for that lost opportunity, and now I watch it every summer. It's a seasonal film for me, marking the time of sun and swimming and beaches the way It's a Wonderful Life marks Christmas. This image released by Peacock shows cinematographer Bill Butler, standing, and director Steven Spielberg during the filming of 'Jaws.' (Peacock/Universal Pictures via AP) Jaws is often cited as the first summer blockbuster, its unprecedented success — it became the highest-grossing movie ever at that time — bringing in big changes in the way studios made, marketed and distributed movies. It changed the cinematic landscape so dramatically that it's hard now to remember the before times — when summertime was the slow period for theatres, when marketing was a minor line-item in a movie's budget, when studios preferred to slow-roll their releases over a period of weeks. We now take massive, much-hyped, multiplex-blanketing event movies for granted. But we should never take Jaws for granted. Beyond being a business model for Hollywood's summer hits, beyond being an important, influential and endlessly quoted pop-culture phenomenon ('You're gonna need a bigger boat'), Jaws is just a damn fine movie. Five decades later, it remains brilliantly better than most of the blockbusters that have followed in its chum-strewn wake. Unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, the industry has too often picked up the film's formula without taking in the finer points of Spielberg's approach. Adapted from Peter Benchley's 1974 novel, Jaws takes us to a coastal community that relies on summer tourist dollars to stay afloat. When a killer shark appears off its shores in the leadup to the July 4th weekend, craven town mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) and concerned police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) clash over how to handle the situation. Ultimately, the reluctant, ocean-fearing Brody, with smart-assed shark biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and salty, hands-on shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw), head out to open water for a classic humans-versus-nature showdown. This basic template has since been applied to alligators, anacondas, aliens and tornadoes, but the imitators rarely achieve Jaws' beautiful balance of B-movie pleasure and Moby Dick heft. Surprisingly, for a movie that has had such an outsized effect, a lot of its virtues are modest. Spielberg is a consummate craftsperson, and in Jaws his style is effective, economical and (mostly) unshowy. This image released by Peacock shows Roy Scheider in a scene from "Jaws." (Peacock/Universal Pictures via AP) Yes, there's that famous dolly zoom that film kids love to talk about — the moment Brody realizes his children and the shark are in the same water and Spielberg uses his camera to replicate that sudden, disorienting lurch of terror. But a lot of the film's power comes out slowly and cumulatively, as Spielberg makes the dozens of small, subtle decisions that go into good visual storytelling. There are the deep-focus crowd scenes that ground us in the chaos and conflicts of this small community. There's the tight framing and careful blocking of the three main actors — Scheider, Dreyfuss and Shaw — on that cramped boat, which gradually build up a picture not just of the individual characters but of their shifting power dynamics and changing sympathies. There's the unlikely sunlit horror of the beach scenes and the sea-level camera angles that take us — uncomfortably — right into the action. There's the precise pacing, which builds suspense with a quiet, relentless momentum that matches the 'du-dum, du-dum' of John Williams' famous score. This restraint makes the sparingly used jump scares that much more effective. No shot is wasted, no sequence is extended longer than necessary, and that less-is-more approach extends — crucially — to the shark. In this pre-CGI era, Spielberg was using practical effects, and the three formats of rubber-and-steel mechanical shark — all called Bruce by the crew — broke down constantly. Faced with a ballooning budget and a shoot going 10 weeks over schedule, Spielberg ended up using the physical presence of the shark sparingly. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. This was a necessity that became a cinematic gift, as clever editing — and viewers' minds — conjured up a horror that went far beyond what Bruce, even at his toothiest and thrashiest, could provide. Keeping the monster mostly offscreen, Spielberg essentially created a shark that was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And while the monster remains mysterious, the people and the places are specific, in ways that are unusual in most blockbusters today. The current tendency in summer action movies is to go bigger and bigger, so sometimes the whole world, or even the entire universe is under threat. Once again, Jaws goes smaller. Grounded in a human scale, the story deals with a handful of deaths and comes down to one shark and three men on a boat. Yet somehow these stakes feel larger. Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are shown in a scene from 'Jaws.' (Peacock/Universal Pictures) Again, less is more with this classic film, a big blockbuster made great by myriad small details. (One darker final note: Jaws kicked off the sharksploitation genre, which has demonized these animals as monsters that attack with malign, targeted intent, and these anti-shark tropes have had disastrous real-world effects on shark populations. When watching the movie, it's important to keep in mind that, statistically speaking, you're more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine or a charging cow than a Great White.) Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. 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