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By DAVE KEHR
AS part of Universal’s centennial celebration that studio has reissued “Jaws” (1975) on Blu-ray in a newly restored edition, retrofitted with a remixed 7.1-channel stereo soundtrack. Happily, the filmmakers have resisted the temptation to replace Bruce, the balky mechanical shark (actually three of them, used for different types of shots) whose frequent breakdowns helped swell the shooting schedule to 159 days from 55, with a digitally animated creature. A C.G.I. shark might have been more convincing for contemporary audiences — poor Bruce can’t do much more than roll his eyes and flap his mouth, like the world’s most menacing Muppet — but the movie isn’t really about him, after all.
Still, he scared millions of moviegoers 37 summers ago, when “Jaws” changed the nature of American moviegoing by opening on more than 400 screens across the country, backed by an intensive television advertising campaign. At a time when most high-profile films opened in a small number of downtown theaters in the biggest markets — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago — and slowly expanded to smaller cities and second-run theaters, allowing word of mouth to build over time, “Jaws” was the first major studio film to seize on the wider American public’s emerging desire for instant gratification.
For movies that opened in only a few “exclusive engagements,” television advertising was too expensive and, in a sense, too effective: those pricey commercials reached a lot of people without immediate access to the product. But the chains of shopping-mall theaters spreading nationwide made it possible to bring first-run films to a wider public, and suddenly TV ads made economic sense. For almost everyone who saw “Jaws” advertised on television in that summer of 1975, the chances were good that the film was playing somewhere within driving distance.
Today a release in only 400 theaters would seem paltry. This summer “The Dark Knight Rises” opened on 4,404 screens in North America alone, and some 10,000 more worldwide, to take advantage of a media presence that is now global. But in 1975 those some 400 screens were enough to make “Jaws” seem ubiquitous, and not just as a film. You could also buy Peter Benchley’s source novel, as well as T-shirts, board games and dozens of other spinoff products. The movie was no longer simply a movie but also a brand name, an idea that George Lucas would take to even greater heights two summers later with “Star Wars.” The film itself was just one aspect of a wider cultural phenomenon.
As innovative as it was, the marketing strategy behind “Jaws” would not have worked unless it corresponded to elements embedded within the film itself — to the insights and attitudes brought to it by its director, Steven Spielberg, who was 26 when he was hired for the project. “Jaws,” in a way, was the first movie by the suburbs and for the suburbs, the creation of a young man who had grown up in new, exurban communities in New Jersey, Arizona and California. It’s a movie that imagines a new kind of action hero — the middle-class father, as embodied by Roy Scheider’s small-town police chief, Martin Brody — and carefully differentiates him from earlier archetypes.
The slight, self-deprecating Brody is a creature quite different from the hypermasculine, fiercely independent adventurer represented by Robert Shaw’s professionally crusty Captain Quint, who operates entirely on instinct and testosterone, Errol Flynn on his way to becoming Wallace Beery. And neither does Brody resemble the revised model of action heroism that emerged during the ’60s: the self-assured, emotionally disengaged technocrat, like James Bond with a graduate degree, represented here by Richard Dreyfuss as the marine biologist Matt Hooper.
Brody may not have Quint’s experience or Hooper’s education, but he has something neither of those two professional loners do — a family, consisting of a wife (Lorraine Gary) and two young sons (Chris Rebello and Jay Mello). His involvement is personal and protective, and his emotional commitment will allow the amateur to triumph where professionals have failed.
A refugee from a collapsing, crime-ridden city (a former New York police detective, Brody could almost be a continuation of Scheider’s character in William Friedkin’s 1971 “French Connection”), Brody is not about to allow any shadow of urban angst to fall across the sunny beaches of his new home.
Given the chance to return to New York, he almost angrily turns it down. His commitment is to the town of Amity (“It means ‘friendship,’ ” explains Murray Hamilton’s mealy-mouthed mayor) and the new kind of American community it stands for, positioned between the decaying city and the vanishing rural village.
“Jaws” remains a wildly disparate collection of elements, incorporating literary references to Melville (“Moby-Dick”) and Ibsen (“An Enemy of the People”), stylistic devices from Hitchcock (including a re-creation of the famous “Vertigo” zoom-in, dolly-out shot) and a dose of comedy that, as Pauline Kael noted, owes a lot to Woody Allen’s wisecracking schlemiels. (“You’re going to need a bigger boat.”)
It’s a film that begins as a sort of underwater slasher movie, setting up themes that would be developed by “Halloween” (1978) and “Friday the 13th” (1980). It’s the specter of unregulated female sexuality, in the form of a drunk college student out for a midnight nude swim, that summons violent death from the deep.
But by its last act “Jaws” has evolved into a boy’s seafaring adventure out of Kipling or Stevenson, a transition marked by John Williams’s score, which shifts from the pulsing suspense of Bernard Herrmann’s music for “Psycho” to an expansive, swashbuckling theme that evokes Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s compositions for “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
What the film lacks is any sense of adult sexuality — the very element that had defined the New Hollywood of the early ’70s. This was a deliberate decision; the screenplay eliminates a major subplot in Benchley’s novel, involving an affair between Brady’s wife and Hooper. Only a few months earlier Hal Ashby’s “Shampoo,” with Warren Beatty as a bed-hopping hairdresser, had opened, following the old release strategy of exclusive, big-city engagements. “Jaws” and its descendants would put an end to all that, both as a business model and as an aesthetic. (Universal, Blu-ray $29.98, DVD $19.98, PG)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/mo...-ray.html?_r=1