The enduring appeal of Jaws, 50 years on

It’s been 50 years since audiences first thrilled to the thudding theme music and bared teeth of the original Jaws. The movie, released on June 20, 1975, immediately had customers lining up around the block, recouping its then-astronomic $20 million production cost within a week. It still stands alongside Rocky and Star Wars as one of a trio of enduring “high-concept” mid-70s blockbusters. In keeping with Sylvester Stallone’s boxing picture and George Lucas’s space opera – and most other Hollywood money-spinners – it’s easy to forget that there was nothing inevitable about the film’s long-lasting success.

For one thing, Steven Spielberg was just 26 when he directed it and had only two screen credits to his name: the then-unreleased Sugarland Express, and Duel, a made-for-TV movie about a man being stalked by a big-rig truck. Spielberg once told me that even he had had doubts about whether his watery monster movie would resonate with audiences. “We had so many problems getting the mechanical shark to work that all I could remember was the nightmare of the shoot. It could have been a total disaster. When I went to the first preview, in Dallas, and people were literally screaming and jumping up and down on their seats my thought was, ‘Oh my God!’”

Spielberg consistently takes a suggestive, less-is-more approach to his craft

The movie’s plot is easily recalled: we’re on Amity Island, a tourist resort, where a great white shark chooses the Fourth of July weekend to run amok in the coastal waters. After the first attack, the town’s police chief, played by Roy Scheider, is persuaded by local businessmen not to upset the area’s economy by closing the beaches.

The chief initially agrees – and carnage ensues. At that point, he sees the error of his ways and goes in search of the shark with an Ahab-like sea captain and an oceanographer, played by Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss respectively.

Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into what’s basically a ripping good yarn, but there are some timeless elements at work in Jaws. “I always wanted the point about human greed to come through,” said Peter Benchley, the author of the pulpy novel that Spielberg adapted for the screen. Today, Benchley’s book reads much like one of those perfectly competent but arid Jeffrey Archer potboilers, whose worldwide success is an enduring mystery.

“A bomb is under the table, and it explodes – that’s surprise,” Alfred Hitchcock once observed. “The bomb is under the table but it doesn’t explode – that’s suspense.” Spielberg is firmly in the Hitchcockian school when it comes to the man-eating shark. We barely see the creature in the first half of the film and right up to the climax most of its handiwork is implied, rather than shown in gory close-up.

In one scene, a pair of Amity residents, tempted by the prospect of claiming the $3,000 bounty on offer, meet by night on a wooden pier, hoping to catch the shark. One of the men passes a hook through some roast meat and tosses it in the water. Sure enough, the shark takes the bait, before going on to wrench the entire pier loose from its moorings and run with it in its teeth. The scene is gripping. But then Spielberg takes the suspense up several notches when it appears the shark has done a U-turn and is heading back at speed toward the hapless bounty hunters – one of whom is in the water.

In contrast to certain other summer-blockbuster directors, Spielberg consistently takes a suggestive, less-is-more approach to his craft. There’s not a minute of padding anywhere in the movie’s two-hour running time. Jaws is a perfect blend of the Christmas-pantomime technique of giving the audience information (“It’s behind you!”) that the characters don’t have combined with the scenes of real mayhem, signaled by John Williams’s score. It’s not for nothing, the movie picked up Oscars for its music, sound and editing. It’s a case of singularly inspired casting, too, with the ill-assorted trio of the police chief, the academic and the old salt who variously attempt to shoot, tire, tow or debilitate the shark, all the while succeeding in further infuriating it. The final battle is literally explosive.

Roy Scheider’s immortal quip – “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” – spoken after he sees the beast up close for the first time was, like many of the best lines in Hollywood history, partly improvised. Unsurprisingly, there were continual technical problems on set, mostly involving the challenges of operating Bruce, the 25-foot mechanical shark at the heart of the tale. Instead of using a water tank on a backlot, Spielberg insisted that the movie be shot in the ocean, where the crew frequently complained that the support boat carrying them and all their equipment was too small. “I must have heard them say it a hundred times, so I didn’t exactly pull the line out of the air,” Scheider noted. “But yes, I knew when to use it.”

Both the score and Scheider’s ad-lib produce memorable moments in one of the world’s most iconic films. In fact, they helped make it powerful enough that we never need mention the three sequels.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2025 World edition.