Spielberg's Jaws is back and more frightening than ever on Blu-ray

Jaws is released on Blu-ray next week and yet again I'm faced with the dilemma of purchasing the film on yet another format. Here is my look back on Spielberg's masterpiece recently published on the Cornerhouse website.

It’s been 37 years since audiences first set sail aboard The Orca in Steven Spielberg’s suspense masterpiece Jaws, as part of Universal’s restoration program the original negative has been dusted down, cleaned up and is re-released this month in a glorious new digital print.


Based on Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws is the story of a great white shark that terrorises the quiet beach community of Amity Island. Under pressure from its scheming Mayor and the islands tourist traders, out of town cop Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) agrees to play down the grizzly discovery of a teenager Chrissie Watkins as a ‘boating accident’. But as the body count rises and the beaches close, it’s up to Brody, hippie rich kid Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and wily old salt Quint (Robert Shaw) to hunt down the giant fish feeding on the islands bathers.

Jaws was a massive box office success and a cultural phenomenon in 1975, it was the first film to break the $100 million ceiling, becoming the most profitable film of its time and still remains 7th overall in adjusted box office takings. Its marketing campaign, merchandising and wide-spread opening lay the blueprint for the modern blockbuster, along with Star Wars two years later it herald the end of an era of risk and independence in US cinema and swung power firmly back into the hand of the studios.

Armed with what he would later call ‘courage and stupidity’, Spielberg was hired by Hollywood moguls Richard Zanuck and David Brown for only his second studio feature. Spielberg faced a torrid task wrestling with a story of which Brown would later say ‘If I’d have read the novel twice, we wouldn’t have tried to film it’.

Production proved every bit as difficult as Brown might have been predicated, its $4million dollar budget ballooned to $9million and it’s schedule from 55 days to 159. The script would often be finished only the night before each scene was filmed, boats sank, actors nearly drowned and the shark couldn’t swim. Great credit must me given to Zanuck and Brown for their faith in Spielberg. With the crew renaming the project ‘Flaws’ and under increasing pressure to halt production, they encouraged Spielberg to never stop filming. Even with their shark lying at the bottom of the ocean.

With no shark to film Spielberg would suggest the animal’s presence through his use of camera angles and music. It turned what could have been a laughable monster movie into a terrifying thriller reminiscent of Hitchcock, and with a lasting influence found in films such as Alien and as recently as in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. Spielberg now calls the shark’s inability to swim ‘a godsend’, an example of disaster turning to triumph. Likewise with no finished script in place actors were encouraged to ad-lib, this gave the film it’s most memorable line ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat’ and Robert Shaw the creative freedom to rewrite the famous ‘Indianapolis’ monologue.

Unlike the cynical summer movies it paved the way for Jaws is a film about characters with weight. The camaraderie between the three men on The Orca (helped in some part by off screen tension between Shaw and Dreyfuss) is the heart of the film. Robert Shaw’s Quint almost steals the show with his swaggering Captain Ahab performance, but equally the likeability of Hooper and Brody is essential to our investment in their fate.

Most of all Jaws is still as frightening as ever, helped along by John Williams incredible score, some of the most iconic shots in the history of cinema and excellently edited together by Verna Fields. And I would encourage everyone to go back into the water one last time.

John Garden’s Lost Memories

This is a 2011 interview I conducted with John Garden for Manchester's Cornerhouse. John was touring his live synthesized score to 1925's stop-motion classic The Lost World.

A synthesized musical soundtrack to a 1925 silent film might sound like a strange idea, but John Garden’s recent live score for The Lost World was something of a treat. While the film somewhat predates his electronic soundscapes, they’re both very much Science Fiction stalwarts. You can hear the influence of John Carpenter and Vangelis, all pinned together in the progressive style of Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.

‘I chose to work on The Lost World because of my early childhood interests,’ says John, who talks about growing up watching Blade Runner and Ray Harryhausen films with his father. ‘As a child I was imagining the music I wanted to hear in my head. I’d mix the music from one film and the images from another’ he remembers. ‘You let the film push you in the musical direction. It’s not about a virtuoso performance; it’s about getting the emotion across’. This is where Garden’s soundtrack is so successful. Garden insists there is no need to try and fix the film and enthuses about its acting, and he’s right but his distinctive themes certainly help breathe life back into the faded images. Watching the film, I felt a sense of wonder familiar to Science Fiction cinema of the 1970’s and early 80’s.

listen to ‘We hear from John Garden...’ on Audioboo

The performance could easily have been played for novelty and poked fun at the film’s inevitably dated moments, but Garden clearly loves and respects the material. He scored the film with a suspension of disbelief and the same straight face a wide-eyed child might have looking upon this classic man versus monsters adventure.

‘Kids probably understand more from the music than the script,’ he says, and it’s a shame there were no children at the screening to appreciate this. However, this big kid was not alone in being swept away with the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation, helped along in no small part by John Garden’s modern, yet retro soundtrack.

If he could do it again with any film and all obstacles removed? ‘Seprico – I’d use a dirty funk band with a string quartet, massive horns section and Gil Evans horn stuff over a Funkadellic jam band’. I’m sure many of us would love to see that.