Fifty years ago, on June 20, 1975, a film opened in American theaters that would plunge the country into a kind of masochistic terror. Its title sounded like a scream: Jaws. The film tells the story of a 9-meter great white shark that kills and creates panic in a resort town off the coast of Massachusetts. It was a triumph. Today, it is considered a foundational film.
Foundational, first of all, for its creator, Steven Spielberg, then just 27 years old, with the look of a long-haired, bespectacled post-adolescent. He already had two film credits, and during the filming of Jaws, he appeared mischievous and carefree. But that was deceptive. Fighting through a sea of problems, he was struggling with an ocean of problems, among them a ridiculous shark model, but ultimately found redemption.
Straddling spectacle and auteur cinema, the film’s success opened up a golden path for Spielberg. It was well-deserved. In Jaws, he masterfully filmed the transformation of a beach of carefree vacationers, bathed in pale rose tones, into a scene of collective panic. He turned a shark hunt into a microcosm of human comedy through three men on a boat – the cop (Roy Scheider), the scientist (Richard Dreyfuss) and the killer (Robert Shaw).
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