'Jaws' at 50: The Shark That Changed Movies Forever

                                    

Half a Century Later Jaws Still Bites

Last spring, our Cinema Club kicked off with Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps—a tight little thriller that showed us the roots of cinematic suspense. For our second screening, our “summer edition,” we went in a very different direction: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). And really, what better way to mark the movie’s fiftieth anniversary than by revisiting the film that didn’t just terrify beachgoers but transformed Hollywood itself?

When Jaws opened in 1975, it redefined what a movie release could look like. Before then, summer was considered a slow season for studios. Universal flipped the script with a wide release, heavy national advertising and a marketing blitz that built anticipation in a way no film had done before. The result was staggering success and a new model: the “summer blockbuster.” In many ways, film history can be divided into before Jaws and after Jaws.

What’s remarkable, though, is how much of the film’s timelessness comes from what went wrong. Spielberg’s mechanical sharks broke down so often that he was forced to get creative. Instead of relying on effects, he suggested the shark’s presence through underwater POV shots, sudden cuts and, of course, John Williams’s score. Ironically, the absence of a visible monster made the threat feel more real. Unlike so many ’70s creature features, Jaws hasn’t aged into camp—because what we imagine lurking beneath the water is scarier than anything rubber and mechanical. Spielberg’s camera does as much heavy lifting as the shark. The opening attack, told from below, plunges us into the predator’s perspective. 

Later, on the beach, Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) realizes the shark has struck again, and Spielberg borrows Hitchcock’s famous “Vertigo zoom” to stretch and distort the world around him. It’s a visual representation of dread: fear literally reshaping perception.

And then there’s Williams’ music. Two notes—simple, pulsing, inevitable. That theme has become cultural shorthand for danger. Hum it in a swimming pool and suddenly no one wants to dip their toes in. Few scores have achieved that level of cultural permanence.

Beneath the thrills, Jaws is also a story about community and belonging. 

The movie quietly stages an “islanders versus outsiders” dynamic, most clearly in the moment when Ellen Brody, the police chief’s wife, is told she’ll never be a true islander because she wasn’t born there. 
Earlier, a college student who reports the first victim missing identifies himself as an islander, even though his parents have long since moved away and he now attends school in Hartford. That small exchange contrasts sharply with Brody, who lives and works on Amity but will always be seen as an outsider from New York. 

The movie draws a clear line between birthplace and belonging, suggesting that in Amity, identity is something inherited, not earned.

The shark may be the literal threat, but the subtext is about identity, tradition and the fear of change.

The moment that got the biggest reaction from our Cinema Club audience came when the severed head suddenly pops out of the submerged boat, startling the oceanographer played by Richard Dreyfuss. I  waited until after the screening to reveal that the footage used in the final cut wasn’t filmed off Martha’s Vineyard but in the swimming pool of the film’s editor, Verna Fields.

That jolt is one of my favorite Jaws moments, along with the first appearance of the shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) at the town meeting, where he offers to kill the shark for $10,000—roughly $60,000 in today’s money—getting everyone’s attention with  literal fingers on a chalkboard.

I also love the small, almost unnoticed details: the boy building a sandcastle and singing “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” while, nearby, the owner of the dog  Pipit calls out for his pet to return from the surf. The same boy is later seen shouting “Get out of the water!”

And of course, there’s the darkly comic scene where Shaw’s Quint and Dreyfuss’s Hooper compare their scars—a moment that manages to be funny, grotesque and oddly tender all at once.

Rewatching it fifty years later, Jaws still works on every level: as a piece of suspense filmmaking, as a cultural phenomenon and as a case study in how limitations can spark creativity. If The 39 Steps taught us the grammar of suspense, Jaws showed us how that grammar could be scaled up into a global language. Half a century on, Spielberg’s great white hasn’t lost its bite.

For the three of us who started the Cinema Club, the joy comes from sharing the films we love with people who might be seeing them for the first time. Screenings like this remind us why we began in the first place—to celebrate the enduring power of vintage cinema and to invite our peers into that ongoing conversation.