Jaws

Jaws is a horror film that people remember as an adventure film, and the reason it still works is that the shark is broken.

Bruce — the three pneumatic sharks built for the production — did not function in salt water. Spielberg, twenty-seven and over schedule on Martha's Vineyard, was forced to shoot around the thing the film was named after, and the solution he improvised became the film's grammar: a yellow barrel, a dorsal fin, a point-of-view shot looking up at kicking legs, a severed head drifting out of a hull, and two notes on a double bass. The shark is fully visible for perhaps four minutes of a two-hour film. Every horror director who has held something back since is working from the accident.

The first hour is also a very good film about municipal government. Brody knows what is in the water; the mayor knows what closing the beaches on Independence Day weekend costs; the film is specific that the deaths are procurement decisions. Mrs Kintner slapping Brody in front of the harbour is the moral centre of the picture, and the beach sequence that follows — a crowded shore, a dog named Pippet, a boy on a yellow raft, and Spielberg's dolly-zoom onto Brody's face — is one of the great constructions in American cinema.

The second hour is a three-hander and the best of it is a scar

Once the Orca leaves the dock, Jaws becomes three men in a small boat: a policeman afraid of water, a rich young oceanographer, and a professional who has decided this is personal. The scar-comparing scene is where Robert Shaw's Quint tells the story of the USS Indianapolis, and it is four minutes of a man talking in near-darkness that is more frightening than any attack in the film.

Where it shows its seams

The shark itself, when fully lit in the final twenty minutes, is a rubber prop and looks like one. Hooper's diving-cage sequence was reshot with live footage and does not quite cut together. And the film's last act is a different genre from the first, which is the price of the structure.

For the same monster-in-a-closed-space escalation, Alien; for the same creature hunting by sense rather than motive, A Quiet Place; for the same descent into an environment that does not want you, The Descent.

The short answer: the shark destroys the Orca over the course of a day, swallowing the barrels, ramming the hull and finally coming aboard the sinking stern, where it kills Quint. Brody, alone on a boat going down by the bow, retreats up the mast to the masthead with Quint's rifle and a tank of compressed air. He forces the scuba tank into the shark's mouth as it comes at him and then shoots the tank from the mast — "smile, you son of a bitch" — and the shark explodes. Hooper, who escaped the crushed diving cage and has been hiding under the reef, surfaces alive. The two of them paddle back to Amity on the Orca's floating debris.

How does Brody kill the shark in Jaws?

By detonating a compressed-air cylinder in its mouth. The film sets the mechanism up twice — Hooper warns about the tanks rolling loose early on, and Quint's rifle is established as the only long gun aboard. Brody jams a tank between the shark's jaws, climbs the mast of the sinking boat, and hits the valve with the rifle on the fourth or fifth shot. In Benchley's novel the shark simply dies of its injuries and sinks; the explosion is the film's invention.

What is the Indianapolis speech in Jaws?

Quint's account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in July 1945, after it had delivered components of the Hiroshima bomb. Around nine hundred men went into the water and, in Quint's telling, the sharks took most of them over four days before a rescue arrived. It explains his obsession in one monologue and does it without any flashback or score. The speech was rewritten on location — Howard Sackler, John Milius and Shaw himself all worked on it — and Shaw delivered it in close to a single take.

Does Hooper die in Jaws?

Not in the film. The diving cage is destroyed and the shark passes him, and he hides on the sea floor until the fight is over; he surfaces at the end and swims back with Brody. He does die in Benchley's novel, and the film's live-shark footage was shot in Australia with a scale double, which is why the cage sequence had to be rebuilt in the edit to let him survive.

Is Jaws based on a true story?

Only distantly. Benchley cited the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks — five victims over twelve days, including two in a tidal creek — and the 1964 capture of a very large great white off Long Island as the two sources for his novel. Amity, the Orca, Quint, Brody and the Fourth of July are inventions, and the behaviour the film attributes to the shark is not how great whites behave.

Why is the shark barely shown in Jaws?

Because it did not work. The three mechanical sharks corroded, sank, failed to hold their skin and would not operate in sea water, and Spielberg rewrote the film around their absence — the barrels, the fin, the submerged point of view, the hull creaking, the Williams cue. The effect is that the audience assembles the shark itself, and it is larger in every viewer's head than the prop that finally appears.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Reality anchor 012 is near the floor — only 2 works score lower. There is no supernatural element of any kind, no dream sequence and no unreliable perspective. A town, a boat and an animal.

Tone 046 is close to the midpoint — 97 works score lower, and that is high for a film with this body count: two of the three leads come home, the shark dies, and the last line is a joke.

Era bias 014 is deep analog — only 25 works score lower. 1975 Panavision, in-camera dolly zoom, pneumatic effects and an orchestral score recorded to tape.

Viscera 034 is low — 40 works score lower. A severed leg sinking, a head in a hull, a bitten arm in the shallows, and Quint's death, which is explicit for about three seconds.

Pace 058 is on the shock side, with 77 works slower. The attacks are short, sudden and widely spaced, and the film is otherwise unhurried.

The threat at 036 leans away from the human — 52 works score lower. The shark has no motive; the mayor does, and the film holds him responsible for at least one death.

On jump scares: three, and the head in the hull is the most effective in cinema.