Why ‘Jaws’ Works

On the most basic level “Jaws” is a movie about a relentless great white shark, terrorizing the residents of a beach community during a Fourth of July weekend. It was the razor-toothed beast who adorned the onslaught of T-shirts and other merchandise when the film came out 50 years ago, premiering in June 1975 and all but creating what we think of as the modern blockbuster. It was the shark who got the two-note tuba treatment from John Williams’s ominous score.

But the new National Geographic documentary “Jaws @50,” now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, makes one thing as clear as a summer day on Amity Island: “Jaws” is primarily about flawed people, not a scary fish. The real villain is not the shark, who, after all, would be happy to be left alone. (As the shark conservation biologist Candace Fields says in the documentary, “The sharks are not infesting the water. The sharks live in the water”).

The bad guy is the avaricious mayor (Murray Hamilton), who insists on keeping the beaches open during peak season rather than shutting down for safety. The three heroes — the police chief Brody (Roy Scheider), the sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw), and the oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) — form a carefully drawn triangle, written with a depth that has eluded most post-“Jaws” spectacles to this day.

For Laurent Bouzereau, the author and filmmaker who directed “Jaws @50,” the human touches were what made “Jaws” a classic, and what guided a young Steven Spielberg as he turned Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel into a runaway hit movie.

“The humanity of Steven’s approach to everything in his career started emerging in a movie like ‘Jaws,’ where it’s much more about people’s reaction to a crisis rather than the crisis itself,” Bouzereau said in a video interview. “You feel like you know these people, and they all stand out.”