Author! Author!

Hooper tells Brody over the walkie-talkie that there have been no sightings of the shark before a cut to a shot looking down on the crowded beach. In the background a group of sunbathing tourists watch as a man dressed in a blue blazer, white slacks and a wide-collared open-neck shirt walks towards the camera and looks directly into the lens. The microphone in his hand and the manner of his speech identify him as a television news reporter, and he is played by Peter Benchley. Putting the author of the original book in the movie was not simply a case of vanity casting. His experience as a reporter for a syndicated TV news service meant that he could deliver his lines with the right amount of faux earnestness. Even his appearance – which Carl Gottleib described as a “blend of bookish Harvard intellectual and tennis-playing, scuba-diving athlete” – is right for the part: with his square jaw and thick-framed glasses, he could almost be mistaken for Clark Kent. 

He describes Amity in idyllic terms (“clean air, clear water, beautiful white sand beaches”), a verbal equivalent of the picture-postcard image presented by the town’s billboard. As he hits his mark at the top of the dune, he adopts a tone of gravitas in describing the threat to the island as “a cloud in the shape of a killer shark”. It’s an apt description for a community that equates summer with prosperity and one that would not be out of place alongside the prosaic metaphors that the author employed in the source novel.

I Got Rhythm

In the first brief shot we get offshore, the camera pans left to right from the bow of one of the shark spotter boats to reveal Hooper at the wheel. He’s dressed for the part in the denim jeans and grey sweatshirt that he will wear for the second half of the movie, and sports an expensive-looking diver’s watch on his wrist and a large gold signet ring on the wedding finger of his left hand. 

The pleasure boat called Fascinatin’ Rhythm, unlike the the Orca, looks ill-equipped for the task of ‘sharkin’. The aluminium rails on its prow – a visual call-back to the fence motif established in the movie’s opening scene – seem more for token decoration than practicality. In Jaws lore, the boat has gained notoriety as being the one from which writer/actor Carl Gottleib fell into the ocean during the filming of an abandoned scene. Indeed, the way Gottleib describes the day’s shooting in The Jaws Log, the plucky little vessel had clearly been destined for a much bigger role in the movie:

‘Besides us three principals [Dreyfuss, Scheider and Gottleib], there’s a technical advisor to run the boat, Steven the director, a cameraman, a camera operator, a sound recordist, a script supervisor, and a grip…..We shoot the dialogue for a while, the cameraman moving around to various setups, balancing the forty-pound Panaflex camera on his shoulder, trying not to fall into the ocean every time the boat hits a wave.’

Yet, like Gottleib’s own character of Meadows, the boat’s part was cut back until it had only a few brief minutes of screen time. Bearing no ill will against the vessel or the elements, Gottleib was generous enough to include a three-page spread of photos of the craft and his ungainly departure from it in the expanded edition of his classic making-of text.

The Band Played On

As Brody crosses the beach he fiddles awkwardly with his crackling walkie-talkie, and has a brief exchange with Hooper, who is off-shore with the shark spotters. From the bandstand comes the sound of a waltz, reminiscent of a fairground carousel, reflecting the holiday mood of the crowd. The use of source music to underscore a scene was a technique favoured by Alfred Hitchcock. The danceband number that accompanies the reveal of the twitching killer’s face in Young and Innocent, the party music playing against the search of the wine cellar in Notorious, the children’s song that counterpoints the tension of the gathering crows on the climbing frame in The Birds, the Storm Cloud Cantata conducted by Bernard Herrmann that drives the narrative during the climactic assassination attempt in the Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much – these are just some of the examples of the technique at work in Hitchcock’s films. It is, however, the use of the waltz ‘The Band Played On’ from a fairground carousel during the stalking and murder of a woman in an amusement park in Strangers on a Train that is perhaps the director’s most ambitious manipulation of source music. Professor Jack Sullivan’s provides an exegesis of the scene in his book Hitchcock’s Music (2006, Yale University Press):

“In one of Hitchcock’s most explicit operatic gestures, the characters at the fateful carnival sing the score, giving it full dimension as part of the drama. In a conventional movie, the tune would play in the background as a clever ironic backdrop. But Hitchcock takes the music to another level. […] The band plays on through Bruno’s stalking of his victim and during the murder itself, blaring from the front of the screen, then receeding into the darkness as an eerie obbligato when the doomed Miriam enters the Tunnel of Love […] Hitchcock allows this waltz to play on unembellished, with terrifying indifference, as we watch Bruno strangle Miriam in a relection through her glasses.”

                                                                                                                                                    
In her BFI study of Jaws, Antonia Quirke notes the fact that in the Fourth of July beach scene the “eerie fairground waltz …is apparently emanating from the Amity bandstand, but it really has no source. It isn’t presented as incidental music, although that’s precisely what it is.” Indeed, the music is spotted just as a film score would be. It is absent from the soundtrack as Peter Benchley in the role of the TV journalist delivers his to-camera address, but is heard again as Larry Vaughn picks his way gingerly across the sand in his expensive shoes. When, at the mayor’s insistence, the elderly selectman leads his wife and their grandchildren into the water, the music is accorded the prominence of an orchestral score, and manages to stike an almost elegiac note as the sacrificial victims walk down to the water’s edge.

Of the three Oscars awarded to Jaws in 1976, one went to the Sound Department, and the Fourth of July beach scene is an exemplary masterclass in how an aural mix can help build atmosphere. It is obvious that the primary purpose of background noise in a scene is to create a naturalistic environment. We hear the kind of things we would expect to hear on a crowded holiday beach: the playful shrieks of children, the splashing of bathers, the tinny sound of music from transistor radios, snatches of conversation. Yet, as the spotting of the carousel music demonstrates, the placement and manipulation of sounds can serve to comment on the narrative, and provoke certain – often subconscious – feelings in the viewer. A ball-by-ball play of a baseball game comes from a transistor radio as Larry Vaughn walks past the beach cabins. It provides a totemic aural signal that all is seemingly right with the world. America’s national sport is being played out on America’s national holiday, and it is telling that the brief snatch of commentary we hear includes a moment of euphoria (‘Flyball! Deep left field!’). The thrumming rotor blades of the coastguard helicopter are first heard as Peter Benchley pronounces the word “shark” at the end of his florid to-camera address. The Mayor glowers at the yellow chopper as it passes overhead, its buzzing presence a constant irritation to him, like a wasp at a picnic. In the absence of the shark, the helicopter becomes an emblem of the threat, its appearance announced by the pulsating sound of its rotor blades, just as the shark itself is associated with a pulsating figure in the film score. Wisely, Spielberg and Williams agreed to hold back the music until the real shark makes its appearance, beginning with an ominous beat at the initial sighting of the giant fin in the mouth of the estuary and culminating in a savage ostinato as Brody races along to causeway to save his son.