Are you still afraid to go into the water? 50 years ago this month, the film JAWS debuted in theaters. The fabled great white shark has thrilled and terrified generations of moviegoers ever since. Its gray fin cutting through the water. The flash of its daggerlike teeth. And of course, that foreboding music. But in the original novel, there is no music, and the shark is not the star. Book critic Joan Baum re-read JAWS, and she reflects on how the film transformed the book from a study in human relationships into a horror story.
2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the blockbuster movie JAWS, directed by Steven Spielberg. Although the novel by edition of Peter Benchley generally got favorable reviews when it first came out a year earlier, the film, co-written by Benchley, and released in June 1975 in conjunction with a paperback edition, made cinematic history technically, critically, and commercially. Not to mention musically: that suspenseful two-note BOOM boom boom boom shark theme by John Williams put him, 26-year-old Spielberg, and sharks in summer on the map.
In 2005, a year before he died, Benchley wrote an introduction to a new edition of the book. In it, he declared he had changed his mind about sharks and had become a marine conservationist. Thirty years earlier, he says, there was no mass environmental movement, and the general view was “the only good shark was a dead shark.”
His research thought, taught him, however, that sharks do not typically seek out and attack humans – we’re too bony and fat-free.
Sharks, though, had been his “childhood passion and he read about Frank Mundus, the Montauk fisherman and charter boat captain who caught a big white in 1964 and was likely the model for the shark hunter Quint in the book.
Benchley got to wondering: what would happen if a shark laid siege to a resort community dependent on summer crowds, especially on the 4th of July? Should the beaches be closed?
Protagonist and good guy Amity Police Chief Martin Brody opts for that, but he runs up against opposition from the mayor, who fears for the town’s economic survival. Reportedly, Fidel Castro said the novel was a “marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism.”
The movie producers wanted JAWS to be, as they said, an adventure story, from A-Z, so they asked Benchley to take out “all the other stuff.” That meant an affair between Chief Brody’s wife, Ellen, who hails from the upper class, and the young, wealthy oceanographer Matt Hooper, who comes down from Woods Hole to assist in the capture of the shark. “Stuff” also included the mayor’s indebtedness to the Mafia, who had once helped him out financially. If the beaches are closed, he’s a loser.
A main difference between the movie and the book however, has to do with Quint, starring Robert Shaw. The irascible, f-word spewing working-class fisherman from Montauk hired by the town to kill the shark. He gets to deliver a stand-alone soliloquy of several minutes about his war experience on the fated USS Indianapolis when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945, killing over a thousand men and causing the horrific deaths of hundreds tossed into the water and eaten by sharks. This is not in the book. But it is sympathetic to Quint and offers a slight delay to the imminent action.
Spielberg reportedly didn’t like Benchley’s characters and made them nicer, letting the scientist survive along with the police chief. The result was an upbeat movie with little, if an,y class tension and no sexual distraction. And now 50 years later? In an era of sophisticated computer-generated graphics and a plethora of grisly horror online, much about JAWS seems tame, family fare.
Ironically, the excised stuff from the book, it’s cynical take on humanity, unapologetic illicit romance, and extended lore on fishing, give it a contemporary feel. And yes, you can go in the water.
