The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Steven Spielberg · a film · 1975 · 124 minutes · screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, from Benchley’s novel of 1974
Mode
Creature film and civic thriller made with the craft of an A picture, turning at the hour into a three-hander at sea
Mythos
The town besieged by a monster from the deep, which takes the young while the elders will not pay its price; the hunt in the monster’s element; the man afraid of water who must go into it
Phase
One summer season, in two movements of about equal weight: on land, from a night swim to the Fourth of July and the chief’s decision to go out; at sea, the voyage of the Orca to the explosion and the swim home
Presentation
Feature film in colour and widescreen, in English, 124 minutes, in one version; shot on and off Martha’s Vineyard in 1974; John Williams’s score, its two-note motif standing for the unseen animal
Register
Dread released in shock; small-town comedy of salesmen and selectmen; the banter of three men in a boat, a drunken song and one long remembered terror told by lamplight
Scale
One town, one season, three men, one boat and one animal
Governing Proposition
A shark kills a swimmer off a resort town at the start of its summer, and the town, whose living depends on the season, hides the death and opens its beaches. When the killing goes on, the police chief, who is afraid of the water, goes out to sea with a shark hunter and a young scientist in a small boat. The wager of the film is that the thing beneath the surface is worse for being unseen; that a town will deny a danger to its own children rather than lose its season; and that the man who most fears the water must go into it and kill the thing alone.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Under the titles the camera travels underwater, to two notes of John Williams’s score. Then a beach at night, and a girl, Chrissie Watkins, going into the sea while the boy with her lies drunk on the sand. She swims out alone. The camera watches from below, and the first blow comes from beneath: her body is jerked across the surface, she calls into the dark, and the boy on the beach is within shouting distance and does not hear. Before the titles have faded the film has given its law. The thing is under the water, it is not seen, and the music is its body.
Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, is the police chief of Amity, a resort town that lives on its summer. He has come from New York, and he is afraid of the water. When the girl’s body is found he would close the beaches. The mayor, Larry Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton, and the selectmen will not have it, and the death goes into the record as a boating accident. The town’s argument is set out in the first minutes and is never settled: a season against a danger, and the children on the side of the danger.
Steven Spielberg directed it for Universal, from a screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb after Benchley’s novel of 1974, and Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown produced it. Bill Butler photographed it, Verna Fields edited it, Joseph Alves Jr. designed it and John Williams wrote the score. It was shot on and off Martha’s Vineyard in 1974, and the mechanical sharks built for it failed again and again in salt water. It was released in the United States on 20 June 1975, and runs 124 minutes. There is one version, and that version is judged here.
Movement II
A crowded beach by day. Brody sits in a beach chair at the edge of the sand and watches the water, and bathers cross the lens between him and the sea, each one a wipe that brings the film nearer to a boy on a yellow raft. A dog goes missing in the water, and nothing is shown. Then the boy, Alex Kintner, is taken in plain sight of the beach, and the camera tracks in on Brody while it zooms out, so that his face holds still while the world behind it pulls away. Verna Fields’s cutting of the sequence is among the most studied passages in the medium.
The death, on a crowded beach, puts a bounty on the shark. At the town meeting the selectmen argue, and Quint, played by Robert Shaw, a hunter of sharks, draws his fingernails down the blackboard to stop them, and names his price. The bounty fills the docks with men in small boats, a chaos the film plays broad. Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss, a young scientist with money, comes to the town. A tiger shark is caught, and the mayor has his false ending. Then Mrs Kintner comes to Brody and slaps him: the beaches were open.
At home, at dinner, Brody’s younger son copies him, gesture for gesture, across the table. It is the tenderest scene in the film, and the one it could most easily lose. The tiger shark is cut open, at length. Out on the water Brody and Hooper come on the boat of Ben Gardner, a fisherman, with a hole in its hull, and Gardner’s head rolls into the hole. Hooper has his proof. The mayor, in his jacket patterned with anchors, will not close the beaches for the Fourth of July.
Movement III
The holiday crowd comes, the town has repainted its sign, and the beaches are open. A cardboard fin sets off a panic, a hoax that repeats work already done. Meanwhile the animal comes into the estuary. A man is taken there, and Brody’s son is in the water.
It is the hinge of the film, and the one place where the orders the first movement has built stand together: the town’s economy, the chief’s family and the animal in one place. The mayor, at the hospital, signs Quint’s contract. It is the last time he is seen. The civic plot that has carried an hour of the film ends with a signature, and the film does not return to answer it; it turns away from the town and goes to sea.
Ellen Brody, played by Lorraine Gary, stays on the shore. Brody, who cannot swim and is afraid of the water, goes out with Quint, who knows the price, and Hooper, who knows the science. The film has spent its first hour in arguments about what is under the surface. Now the land goes, and three men go out to find it.
Movement IV
Quint’s boat, the Orca, is small, and the sea around it is empty. The second movement has three men, one boat and one animal, and each of its scenes changes the balance among them. Quint is the working hunter and Hooper the rich scientist, and Brody, the policeman between them, ladles chum over the stern. The shark rises behind him, enormous and suddenly present, and Brody backs into the cabin and tells Quint they are going to need a “bigger boat”. The film has kept its animal in the water for most of its length, and now it shows it, and the showing is a shock because of what was withheld.
Quint’s harpoons fix barrels to the animal, and the barrels are dragged under and come up again: the invisible made measurable, a body known by its pull. The barrels are Ahab’s, and Quint’s obsession and his scarred hands are too, but the film builds its own hunt. Hooper, the scientist, reads the animal; Quint, the hunter, has fought its kind before; Brody, who knows nothing of the sea, is the one the sea is coming for.
At night, by lamplight, the three men drink at the cabin table and compare their scars, and the comedy runs into memory without a break. Quint tells of the Indianapolis, at the end of the war in the Pacific, and of four days in the water, where he saw men eaten and lived by chance. Shaw delivers it in one long held passage, the camera on his face with few cuts; the others are drunk, and then silent. The men sing. The song is broken off by the animal’s blow on the hull. What lies under the surface is denied until it takes someone, and men tell jokes about it until they cannot.
Movement V
The animal attacks the boat, and the boat begins to come apart. The shark that now rises in daylight, in full view, is a machine, and to a viewer of today it looks like one; the film’s last act depends on what its first hour never needed. The Orca tilts, and Quint slides down the deck into the shark’s jaws. The man who most resembled the monster’s old enemies, who had seen men eaten, is himself devoured.
Brody is left alone, clinging to the sinking mast, the man who would not go into the water now nearly in it. A tank lodged in the animal’s jaws becomes his target, and one shot explodes it. The film has moved from its own law, the unseen, to an action picture’s law, the visible monster and the lucky shot, and the audience cheers where it had held its breath. The survivors swim home together.
The film won Academy Awards for its editing, its score and its sound, and was nominated for Best Picture. It changed how its industry released and sold its films, and made the summer blockbuster a season and a system. What it knew is in its first hour and in a speech at a table: that the thing beneath the surface is worse for being unseen, and that a town will look away from it until it has taken a child.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the film resists it far more than its genre does. The screenplay cut the novel’s affair between Hooper and Ellen Brody and its Mafia hold on the mayor, and what remains is near to bone. Each attack moves the town one step: Chrissie’s body is passed off as a boating accident, Alex Kintner’s death on a crowded beach puts a bounty on the shark, the tiger shark gives the mayor his false ending, Ben Gardner’s boat gives Hooper his proof, and the estuary attack, with Brody’s son in the water, sends Brody to sea. At sea, every scene changes the balance among three men, one boat and one animal. What gives: the bounty hunters on the docks and the cardboard-fin hoax repeat work already done, the autopsy of the tiger shark runs long, and the dinner where Brody’s younger son mimics him, the film’s tenderest scene, could go without loss of structure.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A community whose living depends on a season will deny a danger to its own children rather than lose the season, and its officials will repaint the sign and open the beaches. The mayor in his jacket patterned with anchors, Quint’s fingernails drawn down the blackboard at the town meeting: this is a real social mechanism, and the film’s account of it has been quoted at every public emergency since. A second disclosure is in Quint’s account of the Indianapolis: survival as chance, a man’s whole later life shaped by four days in the water. What holds the figure: the civic truth is drawn in broad strokes and set aside at the hour, when the film leaves the town and never returns; the mayor is never answered; and much of what the film is loved for is fear itself, a mood superbly rendered rather than a meaning.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Terror, often and high. The opening night swim, the girl’s body jerked across the surface while the boy on the beach lies drunk within shouting distance; the Kintner attack seen from Brody’s chair, the beach blocked by passing bodies, and the track and counter-zoom on his face; Ben Gardner’s head rolling into the hole in the hull; the shark rising behind Brody as he ladles chum, and his backing into the cabin with “bigger boat”. The summit is the Indianapolis speech, delivered at a table by lamplight in one long held passage, three men drunk and then silent, and the shark’s blow on the hull breaking off the song that follows. Held short of the top because the elevation is nearly all of one kind, dread released in shock, and its last summit, the tank exploding, trades awe for cheering.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears the structure. The first movement is the town besieged by a monster from the deep: the dragon that takes the young, the elders who will not pay its price, the stranger-guardian who cannot swim. The second is the hunt: three men go out in a small boat to the monster’s element, and the man who most resembles its old enemies, the scarred hunter who has seen men eaten, is himself devoured, sliding down the deck into its jaws. Moby-Dick is plainly evoked, in Quint’s harpoon barrels, his obsession and his doom, but the film builds its own pattern: the man afraid of water must go into it and kill the thing alone, clinging to a sinking mast. The particular stays particular, a police chief from New York, a town’s Fourth of July. Held below the top because the archetypes are clear rather than deep, and Melville’s are borrowed more than reworked.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the creature film of the 1950s, the disaster cycle of the 1970s, Hitchcock’s suspense and The Birds above all, a town attacked by nature while authority looks away, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in the civic plot, and Melville for the hunt. The turns are real: a monster film made with the craft of an A picture; the monster withheld for most of its length and made present through its point of view, the barrels and the music; a long monologue at the climax of an action film; the change of genre at the hour, from civic thriller to a three-hander at sea. The stake was real too: a young director, a film far over schedule and budget, shot on the open sea. The wager on form was smaller, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the eleven the Universal Minimum covers: the withholding was in part forced by machines that failed, then made a principle, and the project was a studio’s adaptation of a best-seller.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the thing beneath the surface is worse for being unseen. The camera is set at the waterline, half in and half out. The underwater point of view, travelling among the swimmers’ legs to Williams’s two notes, makes the viewer the predator and the motif its body, and the barrels make the invisible measurable. The two movements are the knowledge in form: on land, men argue about what is under the water; at sea, the boat shrinks, the land disappears, and argument gives way to the animal. A film that showed its shark from the start would know something smaller. Held below the top because, past those devices, the form is classical narrative well used: the second movement is plotted as an adventure, and the explosion closes it by convention rather than by the form’s own logic.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Fifty-one years of return, and the film yields more than its genre. It has been read as a parable of a government that lied about a danger, released a year after Nixon resigned; as an allegory of class, the working hunter, the rich scientist and the policeman between them; as a study of masculinity, in the comparing of scars and the shanty; as a film about the father, Brody watching his son and the sea in one shot. Formally it repays study: the cutting of the Kintner attack, the placing of the motif, the speech held in a single setup. Held at the figure because much of the writing it has drawn is industrial history, the making, the release and the blockbuster, and craft study; the readings are more often applied to it than drawn from depths it hides. On the third viewing it is chiefly the same film, perfectly made.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a synthesis more than a reorganisation of possibility: the film brought Hitchcock’s grammar of suspense, the withheld threat and the killer’s point of view, to a creature picture at full craft, and its sources are plain. The reach is as wide as any film’s of its decade, and it is largely industrial and generic: what it redirected was how Hollywood is run, more than what film can do, which is why the figure stops short of the films that changed the art itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the wide release sold by a national television campaign, which the industry took as its model; the summer blockbuster as a season and a system; the creature and survival film after it, Alien (1979) among them; and the two-note motif, become the common sign of approaching danger.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-one years. The form survives whole: one version, no loss, no recut displacing it, and its restorations are repair. Presence is as wide as a film’s can be: continuous on television and on every home format, repeated theatrical revivals, selection for the National Film Registry, its music and lines in common use by people who have not seen it. Part of that presence is fame, which is not proof of permanence; but the film is also taught as a model of suspense and editing, which is use. Held a tenth below the widest presence because the surface is charged in one place: the mechanical shark of the last act, seen in full daylight, reads as a machine to a viewer of today in a way the withheld shark never does, and the climax depends on it. It stands a tenth above Schindler’s List, by the longer span.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Verna Fields’s cutting of the Kintner attack, the beach crowd glimpsed through passing bodies, each bather crossing the lens a wipe toward the yellow raft; Bill Butler’s camera at water level; Williams’s score, the motif, the hunting music in the manner of a shanty, and the silences where the motif is withheld; overlapping, half-improvised talk among three actors who make their men distinct in a few lines; Robert Shaw’s speech, held on his face with few cuts. The charges fall where a viewer feels them: the shark of the last act shows its seams, the day-for-night is uneven, the hoax and the docks are broad, and the exploding tank asks the viewer to accept physics the film has not prepared. Command, not mastery at every point: two tenths below The Third Man and Chinatown, at 9.0.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the town comedy of the first hour, the mayor’s salesmanship, the selectmen, the hoax, the son mimicking his father at dinner; and the Indianapolis speech, a survivor’s memory of a war’s last atrocity at sea. One law governs both: what lies under the surface is denied until it takes someone, and men tell jokes about it until they cannot. The comparing of scars passes into Quint’s speech without a break, which is the law at work, and the range is wide for a genre film. The strain comes at the end. The civic plot of the first movement is dropped without resolution, the mayor last seen at the hospital and never again; and the final act moves from the film’s own law of the unseen to an action picture’s law of the visible monster and the lucky shot, a change of physics as well as of register.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure: the state, in a small-town government and its police; the economy, in a resort’s dependence on one season; the family, in Brody’s marriage and his sons; the natural order, in the sea and an animal indifferent to all of it; history, in the war in the Pacific carried by one man’s memory; class, in three men in one boat. The plot integrates them at the hinge, where the estuary attack sets the town’s economy, Brody’s family and the animal in one place. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: consciousness is drawn from outside, in three types well acted rather than three minds; the town’s people are a crowd; the sacred is absent; history enters in one speech; and from the hour the film narrows by design to three men and a fish, so that what it holds it holds in sequence more than at once.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.8, then Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.7. A making that bears weight from the cutting of the Kintner attack to Shaw’s speech held on his face, a reach that changed how films are released and sold, and a form that survives whole in one version across fifty-one years.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the state, the economy, the family, nature, history and class are present, but consciousness is drawn from outside, the sacred is absent, and from the hour the film narrows by design to three men and an animal. Below the rest, The Swerve at 7.6 and The Unconcealment at 7.7: a withholding forced by failing machines before it was chosen, on a studio’s adaptation of a best-seller, and a civic truth drawn in broad strokes and dropped when the film goes to sea.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 7.7 and The Swerve at 7.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate and by its aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 97.9, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Jaws as released by Universal in the United States on 20 June 1975, the theatrical cut of 124 minutes, from the night swim to the swim home: directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, after Benchley’s novel of 1974, produced by Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, photographed by Bill Butler, edited by Verna Fields, with music by John Williams and production design by Joseph Alves Jr. There is one version; no director’s cut or reedit exists, and later restorations and presentations are repair, weighed only under The Imperishable. No print, script or recording was consulted. The novel is not part of the work, and nothing it explains is imported. Dialogue is described rather than quoted, except two words whose wording is certain. Details that could not be verified, among them the film’s aspect format, the minute at which the shark is first seen in full and its total time on screen, the length of the second movement, the days scheduled and spent in shooting, the number of screens on which it opened, its box-office records, variant television prints and the particulars of its restorations, are not given.