What's Your Name Again?

Although she says only seven words (not counting the screaming) and dies in the first three minutes of the movie, Susan Backlinie gets her name in the opening credits. Neither Joanthan Filley, who plays the young man drunkenly pursuing her along the beach, nor Lee Fiero, who - as Mrs Kintner - acts bitter and anguished on the Amity dock, get a name check until the end of the picture despite the fact that both of them have more dialogue and screen time. This was most likely due to contractual reasons: Fiero and Filley were cast locally whereas Backlinie was a professional stuntwoman.

Backlinie was cast primarily for her swimming ability and her physical attributes (five foot eight with an hourglass figure of 37-25-37) although to ensure a PG rating her skinny-dipping scene had to be carefully shot in silhouette. Ironically, the classic image of Chrissie executing a langurous stroke on the surface of the ocean is not Backlinie but a body double, the uncredited Denise Chesire. Both women were the same height and had the same body shape and both wore their dirty blonde hair in long straggly tresses. Without access to the casting call sheets, it's difficult to know who played which part that went to make up the composite Chrissie. Certainly, it's Backlinie who we see in close up by the campfire, but the silhouetted figure that runs along the dune shedding her clothes could be anyone. And what of the naked figure that runs into the sea? Is that Backlinie or Chesire?

In fact, it's probably safe to assume that all the beach scenes and the above surface shots of Chrissie swimming are Backlinie. The underwater shots from the shark's point of view are Chesire - these would most likely have been filmed by a second unit crew, probably in a different location. Backlinie is on record talking about the filming of the attack when she was pulled to and fro in a makeshift harness. There are also photographs of her in the water with Spielberg and a camera crew.

In 1977 Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel used two actresses to play a single role in That Obscure Object of Desire, and, in doing so, he was making a point about the objectification of women. Spielberg's decision to use two stuntwomen to play one character was pragmatic rather than artistic. Hitchcock had done the same when filming the shower scene for Psycho: not only did Janet Leigh have a body double to preserve her modesty, but the iconic silhouette of the crazed Norma Bates was stuntwoman Margo Epper, not actor Tony Perkins.

Spielberg, who -technically, if not artistically - is on a par with Hitchcock, made sure that we can't see the join, and in doing so ensured that Susan Backlinie became one of the select few performers in the history of cinema whose fame rests on just a few seconds of screen time.

Aw Shucks

If Jeffrey C. Kramer - credited below Carl Gottleib and above Susan Backlinie - signed on for the part of Patrolman Lenny Hendricks on the basis of the novel alone, he must have been disappointed. In the book the character is a veteran of Vietnam, a competent officer with a command of radio call signs, a working knowledge of boats, and with an ambition to one day be chief of police himself. The movie reduces him to a likable but bumbling sidekick, more boy than man, more well-meaning than effective. In fact, the Hendricks of the movie seems to be based more on the character of Patrolman Maxwell Slide from The Sugarland Express than the police officer created by Peter Benchley.

Kramer appears in a number of scenes to provide background continuity and to underline the fact that - like the town of Haddonfield in John Carpenter's Halloween - the local police force is run by a skeleton crew. He's one of the passengers in the car that sneaks up on Brody on the local ferry; he's in the crowd at the town hall meeting and later helps stake out the No Swimming signs on the beach; he's on the dock, unlit cigarette in his mouth, when the shark bounty hunters descend on the town; he supervises the cleaning of the defaced billboard while Brody, Hooper and Vaughn bicker over the missing shark's tooth; and he's on one of the patrol boats in the Fourth of July beach scene. On the rare occasions he gets to deliver dialogue, it is usually to display childish querulousness ("What's wrong with my printing?") or inappropriate boyish enthusiasm ("We had a shark attack at South Beach this morning, mayor!").

Kramer had his part beefed up for Jaws 2 and displayed a knowledge of seafaring that gave him the edge over Roy Scheider's Brody, who was still all at sea when it came to boats. He remained a supporting actor (mostly in television) throughout the Eighties, and turned to producing in the following decade, most notably on the hip legal comedy-drama series Ally McBeal.

Improv

Carl Gottlieb receives two separate screen credits in the opening titles, one as actor, the other as writer. It was a fitting combination considering that he had started his career in improvisational comedy with the San Francisco based group The Committee. Improv demands both the disciplines of performer and writer - it's as much about refining and redrafting material as it is about coming up with ideas spontaneously.

Even the way in which Gottlieb was hired to work on the picture had an element of improvisation about it. He was initially brought on by his friend Spielberg to give the script a polish, and he took on the assignment thinking it would be a quick rewrite. Peter Benchley's third draft screenplay had already been worked over by playwright Howard Sackler and tinkered with by Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, who had written The Sugarland Express. Gottlieb met with the director and his producers in the lobby of a Hollywood hotel and went through the script scene by scene. It was clear that they were not going to be ready for the start of shooting in early May, and so within a week Gottlieb found himself on a plane flying to the location with Spielberg.

It was Gottlieb himself who suggested that he take a small role in the picture, which would allow him to fine-tune dialogue on set. Although he had to audition for the part, it was probably just a formality. Not only did he share the same bulk as the character of Amity's newspaper editor Harry Meadows, but he was also a close personal friend of the director. His one big scene in the movie - where he tries to get Amity's fisherman to pose for a picture - would have allowed him to channel his real-life on-set frustrations. Without a full working script and a full working mechanical shark, the movie quickly became one massive piece of improv.

Here's To You Mr Robinson

 
Although Murray Hamilton shares his screen credit with three fellow performers (Carl Gottlieb, Jeffrey C. Kramer, and Susan Backlinie), his name is given prominence at the head of the list and is in a slightly larger font. In all fairness, as the movie's most important supporting character, he should have been given a single credit of his own or at least shared credit with Lorraine Gary.

Spielberg says that he always had the actor in mind for the role and in the Inside Jaws documentary singles out Hamilton's work supporting James Stewart in The FBI Story for praise. It's a curious choice as neither the movie nor Hamilton's performance were particularly notable. In fact, Hamilton was far more compelling that same year (1959) in his role as a bartender in Anatomy of a Murder, again supporting James Stewart. The latter film is rightly remembered for a number of reasons (its unflinching treatment of sex crime, its realistic portrayal of the courtroom trial process, its edgy jazz score, and its stark credit sequence) whilst the former -a pedestrian piece of propaganda made with the bureau's full co-operation - is largely forgotten.

Hamilton turned in solid performances throughout the Sixties both on the big screen (The Hustler, Seconds, No Way To Treat A Lady) and the small (Perry Mason, The Untouchables, Dr Kildare), but it was his role as the cuckolded husband in The Graduate in 1967 that was to cement his onscreen persona as a smug middle class materialist. Mr Robinson's exchange with a bemused Benjamin Braddock is driven by the same economic imperative that informs Larry Vaughn's insistence on keeping the beaches open.

Like Lorraine Gary, Hamilton reprised his character for the sequel and was one of the Jaws alumni who appeared in Spielberg's 1941.

Mrs Sid Sheinberg

Of the five performers named after the title only Lorraine Gary gets a single credit. She was, in fact, the first to be cast in the movie and Spielberg claims that he had been particularly impressed by her performance in the Joseph Sargent-directed TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a true-life police drama that served as the unofficial pilot for the hit cop show Kojak. It probably helped that she was also the wife of Sid Sheinberg, who as President of Universal had given the fledgling Spielberg his first television assignments.

Jaws was Gary's first big screen role and it came after almost a decade of supporting and guest starring parts in shows such as Ironside, Kojak, Night Gallery, McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and Marcus Welby M.D., all products of Universal's Seventies TV production line. The actress made no attempt to capitalise on the success of the movie in the way that Roy Scheider did - she played the part of Hysterical Lady in the comedy Car Wash (1976) and the equally hysterical Joan Douglas in 1941 (1979), and then reprised the role of Ellen Brody (slightly hysterical) in Jaws 2 (1979) before retiring from the profession.

Quite what persuaded her to come out of retirement eight years later for Jaws: The Revenge is something of a mystery. Maybe she just liked playing hysterical women, maybe she felt she owed it to her husband to revive the studio's franchise, maybe she wanted a holiday in the Bahamas, maybe she felt she owed director Joseph Sargent something for kick-starting her brief movie career, or maybe - just maybe - she was after an above-the-title screen credit.

Let's Call it Jaws

The movie's single word title appears in white block capitals in the centre of the screen a second or so after the establishing first shot of the sea bed. The first two letters of the word are joined at the base and the second two letters welded at the top. The middle two letters are flush together without touching and the gap between them forms a backslash - like a mirror image of the punctuation mark in the production credit. One could almost imagine an animation of the title -as in the opening credits of Psycho -  in which the letters clamp together like the jaws of the shark, or - as in the geometric design of North By Northwest - slide together at an angle on the plane shared by the A and the W. Later in his career Spielberg would play with titles to highlight the artifice of the medium or to establish his post-modernist credentials, but for this - his first blockbuster - he went for simplicity.

A similar but not identical font was used for the poster but was in an eye-catching red, a colour that Spielberg decided in pre-production that he wanted to avoid as much as possible. The white of the movie title was stark enough to stand out against the underwater night shots, but would have been less effective on the side of a bus. Both the top and bottom of the letters are aligned on the poster, whereas the J of the movie title dangles below the line, like one of Quint's hooks. The bridge of the A does not connect with its left hand strut, creating a gap-toothed effect. The geometry of the W itself suggests teeth, the twin upper wedges like a vampire's bite. The S curls like a tail at the end of the word and provides a pleasing rounded symmetry to the curled hook of the J.

The movie's title has passed into legend although it was one of the last elements of the original novel to fall into place. The word appears multiple times in the book, particularly in the descriptions of the shark attacks, and, although it is never spoken in the film, there are several key visual references to it. It was never intended to refer to the shark itself, but within a few years of the movie's release this had become common usage. Poducer Dino De Laurentiis was probably responsible for starting it all when he was promoting his version of King Kong in 1976. "No one cry when Jaws die," he told Time magazine. "But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. Intellectuals gonna love Kong; even film buffs who love the first Kong gonna love ours. Why? Because I no give them crap. I no spend two, three million to do quick business. I spend 24 million on my Kong. I give them quality. I got here a great love story, a great adventure. And she rated P.G. For everybody."

English clearly not being the producer's first (or even second) language, Dino could be forgiven for his mistake. The error was compounded, however, in the following year by The Spy Who Loved Me. By the mid Seventies the Bond franchise was running out of steam and was no longer setting trends but following them. Naming the villain's key henchman after Spielberg's shark movie was just one more example of the series' creative bankruptcy. Even Valerie Taylor - who should know better - refers to the shark as 'Jaws' in the Inside Jaws documentary. It's an issue that has engaged some of the finest minds on the Internet and, sadly, it's probably never going to be resolved.

Credit Rating

 
After the Zanuck/Brown production credit and before the movie's title card, the three main actors share equal billing, their names forming a triangle in white Souvenir Bold font in the centre of the screen. One year before the release of Jaws Hollywood had witnessed another trio of male actors (Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and William Holden) all fighting for the top billing in The Towering Inferno. Holden, whose star power was on the wane, had little chance of claiming pole position, but Newman and McQueen were an equal match. Only a staggered shared credit was able to satisfy all parties. McQueen's name appeared on the left and - as the eye reads from left to right - was therefore technically first. Newman's name followed, but was raised above McQueen's and so benefited from greater prominence. William Holden - as nominal co-star - came third, but tellingly his name was a fraction of an inch lower still. Trailing the three men, and slightly lower than them all, was Faye Dunaway, the only actress on the movie to be given top billing. The other actors were given below the title credits in egalitarian alphabetical order (starting with Fred Astaire and ending with Robert Wagner).

The triptych credit designed to mollify the superstar egos was adapted for Jaws a year later. Of the three actors involved Robert Shaw had the strongest argument for top billing. He had won an Academy Award for A Man For All Seasons (although in the Seventies this honour had not become part of the branding of an actor that it is today). He was also coming off The Sting, a crowd-pleasing critical hit in 1973, albeit in a supporting role.

Although Roy Scheider's face might have recognition value with movie audiences of the day (he had been in Klute and The French Connection, two key Seventies thrillers), his name was not exactly a box-office draw. However, he did have the argument of screen time in his favour: as the police chief, he is in practically every scene of the movie, whereas Shaw - with the exception of the Town Hall scene and a brief appearance by the dock - does not figure in the story until more than an hour has passed.

Although he didn't know it, Richard Dreyfuss was on the cusp of greatness in 1975. Coming off the Canadian film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which he wrongly thought was a career mistake, the actor was suffering a crisis of confidence. He might have cringed at his performances, but audiences responded to his boyish enthusiasm. He would follow Jaws with the double-whammy of Close Encounters and The Goodbye Girl in 1977, and win an Oscar for the showier of the two roles. For a few brief years in the mid Seventies he was an unlikely movie star before he went into a cocaine free fall from which his career never fully recovered.

It seems more likely that the pyramid credit granted the three main actors was designed to reflect the dynamics of their characters' relationships rather than any fragile egos. Robert Shaw's name occupies the superior position - just as his character assumes command at sea ("You're on board my vessel [...] and I'm captain.") and looks down God-like from the Orca's mast. Roy Scheider's name comes in the 'Steve McQueen' position, identifying him as the first main character deserving of the audience's sympathies. Richard Dreyfuss's name completes the final corner of the triangle, on a level with Scheider's just as the character of Matt Hooper quickly establishes himself as an equal, an unofficial deputy to the town's sheriff. If you read left to right the actors' names appear in the same sequence in which their characters first appear in the movie.

All this is, of course, just fanciful supposition on my part. As is the notion that the triangular figure of the names is a visual echo of a shark's fin or the tooth of a Great White.

Zanuck Slash Brown

 
The movie's first credit - white text on black background, like a silent movie caption card - says "A Zanuck/Brown Production". The producers' two names separated - or, more fittingly, joined - by a simple forward slash was the closest they came to a company logo. Although David Brown was eighteen years older and wiser than his partner, he didn't insist on the precedence of alphabetical ordering, and was probably canny enough to realise that the combination sounded better with the two syllable name preceding the single syllable one.

The name Zanuck also had considerable cachet in Hollywood. Richard Zanuck's father was the legendary producer Darryl F. Zanuck, whose career had spanned the Silent Era, the Golden Age and the decline of the studio system. As head of production at Twentieth Century Fox, he oversaw American classics such as John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine, and nurtured the talents of European directors like Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang. His tenure at Fox also saw the introduction of Cinemascope, one of Hollywood's failed attempts to stave off the threat of television - a phenomenon that Zanuck himself initially dismissed by saying "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

With The Longest Day and The Sound of Music he enjoyed critical and commercial success in the early Sixties, and helped to prevent the hemorrhaging of the studio's finances in the wake of Cleopatra. He could perhaps therefore be forgiven for the nepotism he exhibited in appointing his son Richard to the position of company president. In the latter part of the decade Fox suffered from a number of high-profile flops such as Doctor Dolittle and Hello Dolly, and, in keeping with the Hollywood dictum that you are only as good as your last movie, Zanuck's position as chairman was in danger. In a desperate move to save himself, he did what any self-respecting Hollywood producer would do - he fired his son. It was an act that simply delayed the inevitable and Zanuck Senior was soon ousted by his own board.

Richard Zanuck left Fox to form an independent production company with David Brown, who had also been a victim of the boardroom backstabbing. Their partnership, which was to last for a decade and a half, met with immediate success. The 1973 production of The Sting - a movie that reunited Paul Newman and Robert Redford after their 1969 hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - was a smash. Although the movie was credited as being a Richard D. Zanuck-David Brown presentation, they were not the actual producers on the movie, and so were not entitled to collect the Oscars that it won for best picture. Their follow up picture was the relatively small-scale The Sugarland Express directed by a then unknown Steven Spielberg.

This time they did take a full producing credit, which they had now distilled to their surnames (in reverse alphabetical order) with the pre-Internet forward slash sandwiched between them. Their choice of punctuation mark says a lot about their relationship - its main use (unlike many other pieces of punctuation) is to link and join rather than to separate and divide. Two words placed on either side of a forward slash can be seen as mutually exclusive alternatives, like two sides of the same coin.

A Universal Picture

 
Jaws opens with the Universal Studio logo of a globe slowly spinning in space, one of a handful of instantly recognisable symbols that have heralded Hollywood movies over the decades. There was a time when a studio logo acted as a genre shorthand. The Warner Bros shield accompanied by its brash fanfare meant crime and film noir, Bogart and Cagney; the MGM lion was a sign of classy musicals and sophisticated comedies; RKO's bleeping radio mast introduced Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Tarzan; Paramount's snow capped peak meant Mae West or the Marx Brothers; Columbia's robed lady with a torch was a curtain-raiser to many a cliff-hanging serial; and the sweeping searchlights of Fox's towering gold letters were a prelude to infant phenomenon Shirley Temple (or, to more recent audiences, a Star Wars crawl).

Appropriately enough, Universal had long been associated with monster movies, although it was unlikley that a mid-Seventies audience would remember the golden era of Karloff, Chaney and Lugosi. If anything, the spinning globe was something they would have associated with television shows like Colombo and Marcus Welby M.D, where the young Spielberg cut his directorial teeth. They might too have made the connection between the studio and its infrequent box-office hits such Airport,  The Sting, American Graffiti and Earthquake.

By 1975 the Universal logo had gone through a number of changes: from an unconvincing model globe being orbited by an unconvincing model plane against a background of clouds, through an art-deco glass ball, to the more familiar variant of Planet Earth in space. In its mid Seventies incarnation, the globe floated in bands of pale cosmic dust and was overlaid with the studio's name in large letters of scrubbed gold. Both image and text slowly come into focus as if the projectionist is making a final adjustment before the picture starts. Unlike other studios, which played fanfares against their logos, this later Universal ident was enveloped in the silence of space.

For Jaws, a sound effect was added to the image. Whether natural or electronically produced, it's suggestive of whale song or a submarine's sonar, and has an other-worldly quality to it. Perhaps it's a residue of the director's initial ideas about the music score - ideas that he had had before hearing a note of what John Williams was proposing. On the Inside Jaws documentary Spielberg describes how he had been expecting music that was both weird and melodic and suggestive of what he calls "inner space." The sounds continue as the logo is replaced by a black screen and fade out as the music and the main credits begin.

Today it's commonplace for studios to add little visual or aural metatextual flourishes to their logos, a trend that Spielberg helped kick-start with his knowing Paramount reference at the opening of each Indiana Jones movie.

An-tic-i-pation

Sitting in my local ABC cinema waiting for a matinee showing of Jaws on Tuesday 30th December 1975, I was shivering with anticipation. The lights had not yet come down and people were still dribbling in and settling into their seats. Although the film had opened to long queues four days earlier, I remember that this particular screening was sparsely attended.

The music being played over the cinema's speakers was from the Jaws soundtrack. It was common practice for cinemas to play music related to the film beforehand, presumably to get the patrons into the right frame of mind. Earlier that same month Stanley Kubrick, who was releasing his masterpiece Barry Lyndon, had written a letter of detailed instructions to the country's projectionists, and in it he included information about the music to be played before the movie and during its interval:

"Hopefully, you have been supplied with an LP record or a tape of the film score.
a) Please use Side 1 for the pre-film music
b) During the intermission, play Side 2, starting with Band 2. You can play this as long as you want, to the end of the record.
c) If you play music after the film, repeat what you did on the intermission."

Spielberg's involvement in the release of his movie did not involve such near-obsessive attention to detail. In fact, much of the promotion of Jaws (in the UK, at least) was done by producers Zanuck and Brown. Having had a big recent hit with The Sting, they were being touted as the power behind the creative throne of Hollywood's latest and biggest blockbuster.

The hype surrounding the film had been building up since the film had opened six months earlier in America on 20th June. With no internet and no social networking to spread the word, the hype of the Seventies was built around word of mouth. Hollywood had not yet realised that the marketing of its products could become a revenue stream in itself. There were no such things as teaser posters or EPKs. Films came out and people went to see them, and then they were gone until they reappeared on television.

Jaws, of course, changed all this. The studio adopted an aggressive marketing campaign, releasing the film in 465 cinemas across the US on the back of saturation television advertising. This went against the Hollywood grain of giving a film a limited initial release in big cities before opening in other locations. In fact, Jaws was not the first movie to break with this tradition. The Godfather had opened in 316 cinemas in its second week of release, and The Exorcist had repeated the pattern. These pictures were big hits, but Jaws managed to surpass them both, most likely because Mafia movies and demon-child movies appealed to a more limited demographic than shark-hunt movies. Certainly, Jaws helped to break the movie marketing mould, and theatrical release patterns have now become a science. Perhaps the main reason it has gone down in history as the game-changer is that Jaws was the first film to pass the $100 million dollar mark (and that was back in the day when $100 million dollars was worth something).

I had added my own small contribution to the bulging Jaws coffers, and now the moment had arrived. The music faded out (which, I remember with Kubrickian accuracy, was in the middle of Side 1, Band 3). The large polyester curtains (pink with gold stitching) parted. The lights went down until the cinema was in complete darkness, except for the green glow above the exits.

It's now time to watch the movie again, and over the next few months I'm going to work my way through it, scene by scene and frame by frame. I may need a bigger blog.

Farewell and Adieu

Peter Benchley ends his novel with a ghostly image. Brody stares through "the stinging salt water" as the dead shark sinks "in a slow and graceful spiral, trailing behind it the body of Quint." The fish literally disappears in the gloomy depths whilst Quint's body becomes "a shadow twirling slowly in the twilight." This image of the fisherman being transformed into an insubstantial spirit recalls the phrase about "the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world" from Chapter Forty Eight of Moby Dick, and it might have been a good one to end the novel on. However, Benchley, ever the pragmatist, resists a mystical conclusion, and returns to the living with his final paragraph:

"Brody watched until his lungs ached for air. He raised his head, cleared his eyes, and sighted in the distance the black point of the water tower. Then he began to kick toward shore."

The novel's final sentence points us in the direction of land, and the very last word -"shore"- itself marks the place where land and sea meet. The film ends with the very image of that final word, and, if you look closely between the scrolling credits, you can see two figures emerging from the waves onto the beach.

Mano-A-Mano

Herman Melville said of whaling that it was "a speechlessly quick, chaotic bundling of a man into eternity." In the final chapter of Moby Dick the author makes good on his word with a passage of thrilling, kinetic prose that leaves the reader breathless. The white whale, provoked into a fury by the harpoons in his flanks, rams the Pequod:

"Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow [...] Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume."

With a curse of Shakespearian intensity Ahab darts the whale with another iron:

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee [...] thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

and then, in a moment so swift that you have to read the passage twice to register what has just happened, Ahab is pulled overboard by a fouled line:

"The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; - ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths"

The Pequod disappears beneath the waves:

"And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight"

In the book's brief epilogue (which, through an editorial mistake was left out of the first English edition, and so made a nonsense of the first person narration) Ishmael, the sole survivor, is saved by Queequeg's coffin:

" ...the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks."

This was the template for Benchley's finale. The shark, provoked into a fury by the harpoons in its flanks, shatters the Orca's stern ("Water poured in over the transom."), and Quint curses the fish ("God damn your black soul!") as he throws his last harpoon. His left leg becomes entangled in the line and, after a brief desperate struggle for the knife, he is "pulled slowly down into the dark water." The Orca disappears beneath the waves (" ...the bow raised even higher, then quickly and soundlessly slid beneath the surface."), and Brody, the sole survivor, is saved by an improvised life buoy ("A seat cushion popped to the surface next to him, and Brody grabbed it.")

It's clear from the above comparison of the two texts that Benchley had lifted his action beats from Melville's novel. One significant difference is that while Melville seems to suggest Ahab is dragged to a watery damnation, Benchley's final image of Quint's body ("...arms out to the sides, head thrown back, mouth open in mute protest.") implies the fisherman has been transformed into a Christ-like figure.

The film follows a completely different trajectory for its climax. Just as the shark makes a meal out of Quint, so Spielberg makes a meal out of his death scene, with Robert Shaw coughing up pints of corn syrup and thrashing around in the rubber jaws like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster. When he is finally pulled under the surface, the fisherman's arms are outstretched in a pose that suggests a crucifixion.

Benchley balked at Spielberg's idea for an explosive ending when it was explained to him, and it's no wonder. It would, after all,be patently absurd to think that (a) you could lodge an air tank into a shark's mouth, (b) the shark would obligingly keep the tank in the corner of its mouth like a stogie, and (c) you could then make the tank explode with a well-aimed shot from an old Garand rifle that had been immersed in sea water. Benchley was right to call the ending unbelievable, but Spielberg was equally right to know that he could get away with it.

There is one detail in the novel that is preserved in the film's climax: the shark gets close enough for Brody to look it directly in its black eye, which - in another one of Benchley's commonplace similes - is described as being "as big as a baseball". In the movie the shark smashes through the window of the Orca's half-submerged cabin and, like Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Boulevard, leers into the camera for its close-up.

On A Knife Edge

As well as being famous as the author of The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, Russian dramatist Anton Chekov has also given his name to a dramatic trope commonly called Chekov's Gun. His observation that "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it" is a metaphorical encapsulation of the notion of repetitive designation, or foreshadowing, a narrative technique that requires the author to provide the reader with information which at the time will seem unimportant but will later become significant.

It's a difficult technique to pull off without tipping the audience off, particularly in film. A director often has no choice but to cut to a close-up of an object in order to show it. An example of how not to do it is in John Carpenter's Halloween, when a nurse lights a cigarette and - for no other reason that it will later provide a clue - we are given a ten second Panavision close up of a red matchbook. Far subtler an example of foreshadowing can be found in the opening few minutes of Roman Polanksi's Chinatown, when fisherman Curly makes a barely audible reference to 'albacore' in his exchange with Jake Gittes, a word that ultimately helps the detective crack the Mulwray case.

In fact, as the above two examples show, it's easier to smuggle things through in written rather than visual form. Benchley does it with Quint's knife ("He stabbed the knife into the gunwale, freeing his left hand to hold the rope, his right hand to shove the barrel on deck.") in his busy description of the fisherman snagging one of the barrels. Just over a page later, the significance of the object is revealed ("The knife was there, embedded in the wood."). In the movie - where the knife has morphed into an Indiana Jones-style machete - Spielberg inserts a close up of the blade embedded in the wood. Its obviousness is made even greater by the continuity mismatch of the background ocean, which is smooth and almost golden in the sunlight.

In the end, it's a wasted shot, anyway. When Quint struggles in the jaws of the shark he has the machete in his hand, but we are given no explanation as to how he managed to grab it from the gunwale. Although the audience are so caught up in the action they don't really care, the close-up of the machete remains a minor flaw. To be fair on Spielberg, the director handles the business with the air tank with an expert sleight-of-hand. Had Chekov seen the movie, he would have approved, and might have remarked, "One must not put a compressed air tank on the boat if no one is thinking of blowing it up."

Over A Barrel

Quint finally succeeds in harpooning the shark on page two hundred and seventy, only seven and a half pages from the end of the novel.  The iron strikes the fish "in front of the dorsal fin" just before the fish strikes the boat and sends the fisherman reeling backwards. He, in turn, strikes his head against the foot of the fighting chair and a trickle of blood runs down his neck. In the movie it is Brody who falls back against the chair and cuts his forehead when he and Hooper are trying to reel in the catch that may (or may not) be the shark. Brody's later inspection of this minor injury prompts mock concern from Quint ("Don't you worry about it, chief. It won't be permanent.") and provides a seamless segue into the scar comparing contest.

The last eight or so pages of the book are rife with details that, in some form or other, would we woven into the movie. The lines that connect text and film are so snarled and knotted that you need more than a knowledge of basic seamanship to untangle them. The shark's sudden appearance at the stern while Brody is chumming is one of the movie's big scares, and it has its origins in the text:

"Suddenly he saw the monstrous head of the fish [...] black eyes staring at him, silver-gray snout pointing at him, gaping jaw grinning at him. "Oh God!" Brody said, wondering in his shock how long the fish had been there before he had stood up and turned around."

The shark attacks the boat, first by chewing on the transom, and then ramming the hull from below ("The boat shuddered again, and there was a dull, hollow thump.") It is exactly the sound of "a dull, hollow thump" that in the movie interrupts the drunken sailors' chorus of 'Show Me The Way To Go Home'. Quint manages to get an iron in the shark (hitting it at more or less the same spot as in the film), and the first barrel pops off the transom. Almost immediately afterwards, the shark leaps out of the water and obligingly exposes its "smoke-white belly" to Quint's second iron. In the movie Quint's second harpoon pierces the shark's flank, and it is with his third shot that he finds a target in the white skin below the fish's jaw. In the book Quint gets the shark in the head - "over the right eye" - with his third iron. Whether intentional or not, the number of irons has a suggestion of religious symbolism: the devil fish is vanquished by a trinity.

Leaping out of the water in pursuit of its prey is normal hunting behaviour for a Great White, but the limitations of the mechanical shark would not allow Spielberg to include it in his movie. Indeed, the sled-shark proved to be so uncooperative that the director was forced to rethink his approach and roll out the barrels. The idea had been there in the book all along: "Following the boat, keeping pace, were the two red wooden barrels."

The decision to change the colour of the barrels in the movie was informed by the director's wish to avoid red except for blood (the one exception being the estuary victim's rowing boat), and by an overall colour scheme that made yellow - from the curtains in the Brody kitchen, through the sun hat worn by Mrs Kintner, to the underwater lights on Hooper's boat - a queasy visual indicator of the shark that threatens to eclipse Amity's sunshine ("A cloud in the shape of a killer shark.").

In the book the shark chases the Orca ("The barrels kept coming, plowing through the water...") and Brody asks Quint, "Have you ever had a fish do this before?" - a line which Hooper delivers in the film. Quint's remark that "no normal fish can sound with three irons in him and three barrels to hold him up" also makes it into the movie, albeit in a slightly terser form ("He can't stay down with three barrels on him. Not with three barrels, he can't.").

The Orca begins taking on water, but Quint seems unconcerned ("He's banged us up, all right, but the pumps should take care of it.") and sticks with his plan to tow the shark in once it has drowned. There then follows a paragraph that describes the movement of the barrels "on a random path across the surface of the sea", and over those four sentences three long hours pass. Film, being by its very nature a kinetic medium, could not slow down the chase once it had begun.

As Quint and Brody wait for the shark to tire itself out, the rain eases off, though the sky remains "an unbroken sheet of gray." Quint  makes a noose to throw around the fish's tail when it surfaces. Once lassoed he intends to "drag him till he drowns". The fisherman uses a similar tactic in the movie ("Draw him in to the shallow water. Going to draw him in and drown him."), but - as Shaw's delivery of the line implies - it is not so much a plan as an act of desperation. To throw a rope around the shark's tail, Quint must bring the fish to the surface. He snags a rope attached to one of the barrels using a gaff - a task that in the movie he gives to Hooper and Brody ("Alright, gentlemen, snag 'em.") - and then runs the rope through a pulley. He uses a winch to pull the shark up, a machine that in the film would be used to lower the shark cage into the water.   

In both book and film the action of the winch is interrupted by the shark leaping out of the water and landing on the Orca's stern. Benchley's description of the moment is freighted with religious symbolism, the shark rising up like one of William Blake's dark angels:

"The fish broke water right beside the boat, with a great rushing whoosh of noise. It rose vertically, and in an instant of horror Brody gasped at the size of the body. Towering overhead, it blocked out the light. The pectoral fins hovered like wings, stiff and straight, and as the fish fell forward, they seemed to be reaching out to Brody."

This was the very scene that Roy Scheider overhead Spielberg describing to a guest at the Hollywood party where, according to Jaws legend, he was cast as Amity Chief of Police, and the same scene that made even veteran producer David Brown doubt the wisdom of snapping up the rights to the novel.