The film that invented the summer blockbuster. The shark mostly didn't work, which made the film better.
Amity Island, July 4 weekend. Police Chief Martin Brody, recently arrived from New York, investigates the death of a young woman whose body has washed up on the beach in pieces. The cause appears to be a large shark attack. The mayor pressures Brody to keep the beaches open through the holiday weekend for commercial reasons. A second attack kills a child. Brody, marine biologist Matt Hooper, and grizzled local fisherman Quint set out on Quint's boat the Orca to hunt and kill the shark.
The third act of the film is the three-man hunt at sea, in increasingly close quarters with the shark, as the boat is progressively destroyed. The film closes on Brody and Hooper swimming back to shore after Quint is killed by the shark and the shark itself is killed by an exploded scuba tank Brody shot.
Jaws was released on 464 screens — at the time, an unprecedentedly-wide release — on June 20, 1975. The film grossed $123m domestically in its initial run, a record at the time and a number no film had previously achieved through a summer-launched release strategy. Universal Pictures, which had been planning to launch the film in autumn, was persuaded by Spielberg and producer Richard Zanuck to launch in June.
The success of the June launch reshaped the entire industry. Almost every major studio shifted its blockbuster strategy to a summer-launch model within the following five years. Star Wars two years later (May 1977) confirmed the pattern. By the early 1980s the summer blockbuster had become the dominant form of American commercial cinema. Jaws is the foundational text.
Spielberg's production used three mechanical sharks, all of which malfunctioned repeatedly during the Martha's Vineyard shoot. The original plan involved the shark appearing in roughly two-thirds of the film's sequences. The shark's malfunctions forced Spielberg to rewrite scenes during production to use the shark less. The famous strategy of implying the shark's presence — through John Williams's two-note score, through floating buoy markers, through underwater POV shots, through the empty water around terrified swimmers — was, in the original screenplay, only partial.
The forced rewriting made the film. The implied shark is structurally more terrifying than any depicted shark could have been. The film's most-discussed sequence — the daytime beach attack from Brody's POV on the beach, with the camera dollying-in on his face while a child is killed off-camera in the surf behind him — is built entirely on what the audience cannot quite see. The technique has been imitated since by almost every thriller in any genre.
The film's most-quoted single scene is Quint's monologue about the U.S.S. Indianapolis — the World War II American heavy cruiser that delivered components of the Hiroshima bomb in 1945 and was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on the return trip, leaving roughly 900 surviving sailors in the water for four days as they were progressively eaten by sharks.
The monologue runs roughly four minutes. Shaw delivers it in a single take, in long-form, with Brody and Hooper listening across the boat's small cabin. The monologue is, structurally, the film's argument: the shark in the water outside is not a malevolent intelligence but a force of nature that has been there longer than humanity and will continue after. Quint's relationship to the shark is the relationship of a man who has seen this before. The monologue is widely regarded as one of the great pieces of dialogue in 1970s American cinema.