In 1975 I was studying French at school and our classes were sometimes taken by a young assistant teacher from Brittany. Struggling to interest fourteen unruly boys in the subtleties of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, she tried to engage us by bringing in Xeroxed copies of articles from Paris Match. One of them was on Jaws, or, as the French rather poetically translated it, Les Dents De La Mer (The Teeth of the Sea).
That title ended up coming back and biting the French marketing people in the rear. When Jaws 2 was released they discovered that an elision of the final two words in the proposed Les Dents De La Mer Deux produced the sound merde, a word every schoolboy studying French quickly learns. The sequel was therefore hastily renamed Les Dents de La Mer, La Deuxieme Partie (The Teeth of the Sea, The Second Part). This was a detail that greatly amused the movie's French director Jeannot Szwarc.
Some countries like Israel (Meltaoth) and Poland (Szczeki) provided a direct translation of the title, but the majority chose to avoid any possible ambiguity. In Italy, Brazil and Sweden it was The Shark; in Germany and Austria it was The White Shark; in Finland, The Killer Shark; in Norway, Shark Summer; and in Belgium and the Netherlands it was the The Summer of the White Shark, which I've always thought has a touch of Hemingway about it.
Peter Benchley would famously tell the improbable story that the title was only decided on twenty minutes before the book went to press. When it was in manuscript form he had thought of calling it Stillness in the Water, a phrase which is referenced in Chapter Seven ("That's one of the things divers say about whites. When they're around, there's an awful stillness in the water."). Benchley and his editor finally agreed on Jaws because it was short and would fit easily on the book's dust jacket.
There was a time when the word lacked the resonance it has today. Spielberg, who says he read the book in 'a big block of pages', was intrigued by the title and thought it might be about a dentist. Later, talking himself into making the movie, he saw similarities between the words 'jaws' and 'duel' (the title of his killer truck TV movie) and thought that he was fated to do it.
Jaws is a good title, and in either the white font of the opening credits or the bold red of the movie poster, it grabs your attention. But, if truth be told, it's still only in second place when it comes to the Top Ten Shark Movie Title charts. At Number One, it has to be Blue Water, White Death.
