Steven Spielberg

“Jaws” fever is turning into an epidemic. In its first two months of release in the United States and Canada, “Jaws” has already grossed $90‐million, surpassing the box‐office records of “The Sting” and “The Exorcist,” and by the end of the year it could best “The Godfather” as the top‐grossing film in movie history. The phenomenal success of “Jaws” is astonishing, because the movie—adapted from Peter Benchley's best‐selling novel about a killer shark, and directed by Steven Spielberg—is nothing more than a creaky, old‐fashioned monster picture, reminiscent of “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” and whole rash of grade‐B movies about giant ants, tarantulas, and rats on the warpath.

Although some critics have acclaimed “Jaws” as a movie milestone, it is strikingly similar to another monster movie in release this summer, William Castle's “Bug,” ‘shout giant, incendiary cockroaches that overrun Los Angeles after an earthquake.

The only significant difference between “Bug” and “Jaws” is in the size of the advertising budget. “Bug” was made on a shoestring, without name actors or the benefit of a pre‐sold title, and so it was unceremoniously dumped in neighborhood theaters and drive‐ins across the country, with only the most perfunctory advertising. By contrast, the money spent on the promotion of “Jaws” was the largest pre‐release advertising budget for any movie in the history of Universal Studios.

Audiences who think that they made “Jaws” a success are pitifully naive about the mass media. The campaign to sell “Jaws” began almost four years ago, before the novel was published. A story in The Times Magazine last year disclosed that Peter Benchley rewrote the novel several times at the direction of his editors, who were very conscious of fashioning a commercial property. One of the editors at Doubleday was quoted as saying, “You've got to think of the whole country as a child that climbs up on its daddy's knee and says, ‘Tell me a story.” When producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown bought the movie rights, they worked with the paperback publishers to batter that child into submission. Zanuck and Brown, along with members of Universal's publicity department, cunningly helped to circulate and promote the paperback in order to build the audience for the subsequent movie version.

When this kind of efficient publicity machine goes into full swing it is unsettling to realize how little free choice people actually have. They go to see “Jaws” because they have been conditioned to want to see it, and then’ they like it because they have been too intimidated to resist.

Another disturbing thing is that so many normally discerning critics hive jumped on the “Jaws” bandwagon; their delirious reviews are indistinguishable from press releases. Perhaps these critics are tired of being called snobs and elitists; they want to prove that they have not lost touch with popular culture. The critics probably could not have deterred the people who get their kicks watching dismemberments and mutilations, but they should have remained detached enough to point out the flaws in plot, characterization, acting, and direction.

“Jaws” consists of two separate stories, clumsily stitched together. The firsthalf of the movie deals primarily with the conflict between the chief of police in Amity, L.I., who wants to close the beaches after the first shark attack, and the mayor and other businessmen, who are unwilling to jeopardize the summer tourist trade. Although the venality of the townspeople is really only a gimmick to keep the plot in motion, the glibness of Benchley's sociology and the infantile smugness of Spielberg's cynicism damage the film; the mercenary businessmen and the corrupt mayor are subhuman caricatures. In the most outrageous scene, logic breaks down completely the mayor has succeeded in keeping the beach open, and the seashore is packed with vacationers who are nevertheless reluctant to go into the water. Yet the mayor, who knows the shark may be prowling nearby, walks among the tourists virtually prodding them into the ocean. Even on the movie's own terms, the action of the mayor makes no sense.

The social issues raised in the first half of “Jaws” are merely red herrings, and they are dropped as quickly as possible. The second half of the film turns into a conventional Saturday matinee adventure story three men sgt out to sea to kill the beast from 20,000 fathoms. This section is derivative but at least relatively free of pretension. However, the basic problem with this sequence, as with the opening of the film too, is that the characters are such stock, paperthin figures. The salty, stubborn old fisherman (Robert Shaw)—part Captain Ahab and part Captain Hook —is the most tiresome stereotype. The wisecracking scientist (Richard Dreyfuss) is not much more credible. In typical Hollywood fashion he has been given cute, antic traits —like a lovable puppy—so as not to alienate the yahoos in the audience who still think scientists, being intellectuals, have pointed heads. The police chief (Roy Scheider) fears the water, yet he is the one who finally destroys the shark; in Hollywood's comic‐strip mythology, cowards are always allowed an 11th‐hour transformation.

The shallowness of these characterizations is aggrivated by sloppy acting. Because he exercises some restraint, Scheider comes off best. Shaw bellows and blusters, while Dreyfuss — who showed great promise in “American Graffiti” and “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”—mugs coarsely and relies on a manic cackle that is becoming something of an irritating tic. Since Shaw and Dreyfuss have both demonstrated their talents in the past, the blame for their overacting in “Jaws” must rest with director Steven Spielberg. In his first feature, “The Sugarland Express,” starring Goldie Hawn and William Atherton as a fugitive couple pursued across the state of Texas by a squadron of police cars, Spielberg showed that he could direct traffic but not actors.

Critics who consider “Jaws” a classic suspense melodrama should be required to enroll in a crash course on Hitchcock, who taught that suspense depends upon believable characters and is greatly enhanced by atmosphere. In “Vertigo,” for example, Hitchcock gives a lush, dreamlike quality to his images of San Francisco in order to make us share the hero's growing obsession with the supernatural. A television‐trained director like Steven Spielberg has no real understanding of the visual possibilities of the film medium, The underwater scenes in “Jaws,” which should have created the feeling of a dark, eerie, sinister universe teeming with mysterious animal and plant life, looked as if they had been shot in a swimming pool.

Yet, because of the insistent publicity campaign, “Jaws” has become the entertainment “event” of the year. Maybe I am making too much of a sleazy horror movie, but I am concerned about the effect of this film on other films. The studios are looking for the magic formula for a commercial blockbuster, and since they are making fewer movies every year, they want to minimize risks. The giant success of “Jaws” may encourage them to keep aiming for the lowest common denominator; from now on it will almost certainly be a little harder to find financing for more modest and meaningful films. All the people connected with “Jaws” are going to be big winners in this year's box‐office sweepstakes. The only losers are American moviegoers looking for a film experience that is somewhat more subtle and rewarding than two hours of shock therapy.