This past Sunday, Jaws was screened in Cinema 3 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, with NOW’s Norman Wilner providing an intro to a packed house – roughly 200 people of mixed ages all eager to catch the film that launched Steven Spielberg’s theatrical career 35 years ago, and made people afraid of beaches and ocean swimming for a very long time.

The film’s greatness was perfectly illustrated when Wilner repeated a statement recounted by Jaws co-star Richard Dreyfuss: ‘It’s the only film of mine that I watch all the way through because I forget I’m in the movie.’

It’s fair to paraphrase that statement for most of the audience members, who probably felt it’s one of the few films that’s been parodied (Airplane!) and ripped off so many times (Cruel Jaws, Great White, Orca, Piranha, Tentacles, ¡Tintorera!), and yet it still grabs them and makes them forget they’re watching a movie.

There were some who’d seen the film before on the big screen, some who’d never seen Jaws at all, but most had probably watched it on video and never experienced Bruce the shark eating people in a 35mm print with an aggressive Dolby Surround 2.0 mix.

[SLIGHT SPOILERS!]

The surprise and delight of the audience was more than palpable after the end credits rolled: when Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) aims his rifle at the big fish and says “Smile, you son of a-“ and Verna Fields’ montage cuts from his anxious face to a gun crack and a fabulous explosion that rains shark guts across the ocean, it’s the catharsis we’ve all been waiting for: deserved carnage for a son of a bitch that just wouldn’t die.

Based on Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws moves from an opening teaser kill to a lengthy drama about a small tourist community wrestling with tragic deaths, a miserable mayor and sycophant town council refusing to put the public’s safety before tourist dollars, and a sheriff and neo-hippie marine biologist named Hooper (Dreyfuss) determined to catch and hopefully kill the shark without the aid of the local Big Fish Hunter, Quint (Robert Shaw, stealing every inch of celluloid when he’s in any given shot).

Interspersed between dramatic scenes and wry humour (Mrs. Brody: “You wanna get drunk and fool around?” Chief Brody; “Yeah…”) are documentary-styled montages of the community flooded by tourists, folks sunbathing in tacky bathing suits, and the marina filled with fun seekers – the atmosphere Alexandre Aja copied for Piranha 3D, which itself was derived from the one of the best Jaws rip-offs, Joe Dante’s Piranha.

Hour One is about building characters and setting up three unlikely characters – the cop, the hippie, and the big white shark hunter.

Hour Two is three men on a boat, and the fluctuations of their relationships as contempt, loathing, respect, rage, bafflement, and relief keep swirling amongst them. Some of the conflict stem from personality clashes, but there’s a telling shot that conveys so much: three men standing in the boat’s rear, simply stunned that the shark isn’t just taking every lick they’ve been tossing and lancing at it, but now they are its prey – not for food, but for fucking with it, and disrespecting its place in its domain.

Spielberg doesn’t cut to close-ups: he lets us look at each character and assess how each one is dealing with humility, frustration, and individual efforts to not let the other guy know how screwed they know they are. Even the mighty Quint is stumped by this thing Hooper described to the mayor as a ‘perfect eating machine that knows only how to eat, swim, and make little sharks.’

It’s a mortal threat simplified to three basic skills set, and reminds me of a moment in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man documentary about amateur bear-buddy/idiot Timothy Treadwell, in which we’re shown footage shot by Treadwell of the bear across the creek that probably ate him and his girlfriend soon after.

In his ongoing narration, Herzog describes the bear’s gaze on doomed cameraman Treadwell as the ‘indifference of hunger’ which is what sharks probably feel when they take a sample of the other white meat and decide whether it’s worth a nibble, a leg, or going for the whole course.

Jaws is different because the big fish is pissed, and the script brings together all kinds of threads for moments of poetry: Quint’s fate is appropriate because he was among the few who survived the sharks that ate most of the men who survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in 1945. Man against beast, with no lifejacket, but a knife and a rage for payback.

Deeply engrossing characters is what keeps the drama grounded, but then there’s the filmmaking skill that makes Jaws a classroom study of classical widescreen filmmaking that’s kind of been ignored because of changes in editing styles, the overuse of sound elements, banal sound design in place of score, and hitting audiences with too many money shots.

You don’t get the full experience at home, nor in a home theatre because Jaws mandates a collective experience of laughs, jumps, and literally leaning forward as the excitement of the hunt shift into full gear during the last hour.

There are few moments of genuine gore, but the film’s overall horror is emotionally brutal. The opening swimmer kill as well as the kill in the finale are affecting because of the horrible screams the actors give out, and any blood or physical trauma is just the coda to the emotional shocks.

The floating body parts are sometimes accompanied by shrill music and effects, but there’s also the simple scene where Hooper readies himself for the autopsy of the swimmer and loses his voice when a Tupperware dish tray beholds the swimmer’s remains. We hear his sickened voice describing the massive trauma, and then we see some detail – a severed hand, the only intact remnant of a free-spirited girl.

And then there’s a great montage where Brody flips through a book about sharks. Editor Fields cuts between the turning pages as reflected in his aviator eyeglasses, the book being rifled by Brody’s hands, and close ups of docu-stills that verify the trauma we’ve seen already, and is representative of the carnage sharks can cause when their razor teeth leave nothing but rubbery, fatty tissue drooping from exposed bone matter. This pictures make simple statements: ‘This was a leg. This was an arm. This was a man.’

The best audience jumps were created by Spielberg by cajoling them into trusting open spaces. The topper has Roy Scheider scooping chum from a bucket before something ‘occurs’ in a part of the wide frame we figured was safe because the director showed us that shot before.

Nothing happened the first nor the second time we were shown that composition, so our instinct tells us the third time is safe – and then we get a good ‘boo!’ moment. It’s a use of open space that Wes Craven exploited beautifully in Scream, and Spielberg and Tobe Hooper also milked in Poltergeist (like the infamous clown attack).

If you’ve seen the film before, you know the moment, but I can’t believe I forgot about a second variation, and jumped.

Norm Wilner made a point of sitting at the back of the theatre, because the tell-tale sign of virgins to the film are which backs of heads recoil in fright. Needless to say, he was quite gleeful afterwards that the movie still drew people in with its pincer effect, and that an unrelenting chase between three men and a 25-foot eating machine.

Within Spielberg’s canon, before he embraced saccharine emotions, blatant product placement, and had orphans roller skating in master failures such as Hook, he knew how to craft a good shocker.

His 1971 TV movie Duel (a precursor to Elliot Silverstein’s fun but ridiculous The Car) pitted a man against the worst highway nightmare scenario (a ‘thing’ that won’t let up), but Jaws is elegant widescreen storytelling, with its director using every available cinematic trick the film’s sizeable budget allowed – including Bruce, the customized shark.

This is a perfect film, and Jaws is repeating this week on Friday at 11pm, although this time it’ll be on the bigger screen in Cinema 1. The print has some wear around the reel changes but looks good, and the sound is excellent. John Williams’ ‘da-dum’ theme has solid subwoofer oomph, and the music and directional sound effects are in true 2.0.

After that, you can work your way through the three sequels (if you have to) on video (even though Jaws 3-D does do the rounds in 3-D now and then at the local rep cinemas), or track down the aforementioned knock-offs.

Those wanting a solid dramatization of the U.S.S. Indianapolis story should check out the excellent 1991 TV movie starring Stacey Keach, Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which is available on DVD.

John Williams’ Jaws score exists in two forms: the shorter, weaker, non-chronological re-recorded album, and the meatier original score CD that’s vastly superior.

Williams’ Jaws 2 soundtrack is actually a good thematic follow-up because he expands some of the theme fragments into really elegant works for what’s otherwise an overlong, flat sequel. Alan Parker’s music for Jaws 3-D almost works, but Michael Small’s arrangements of Williams’ themes work beautifully for the otherwise dreadful Jaws: The Revenge.

- MRH