There is no better Memorial Day movie than Jaws. Not because it has anything to do with the military or patriotism or any of the things we traditionally associate with the holiday. It is the perfect Memorial Day movie because it literally invented the summer that the holiday opens.
Before Jaws, Memorial Day weekend was not a launchpad for anything. Studios released their big pictures throughout the year without much thought to seasonal strategy. Then Steven Spielberg put a mechanical shark in the water off Martha's Vineyard and everything changed. It opened June 20, 1975, and audiences lined up around the block in a way the industry had never seen. Two years later, Star Wars did the same thing. Together, those two films turned Memorial Day weekend into Hollywood's starting gun for the summer season. Every blockbuster calendar you have ever known traces back to that moment.
The cast is part of why it holds up fifty years later. Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw. Three actors operating at completely different frequencies who somehow create perfect chemistry. Shaw's USS Indianapolis monologue is still one of the greatest scenes ever filmed, and the fact that it was largely improvised on set makes it even more remarkable. The film won three Academy Awards, and honestly could have taken more.
Then there is John Williams. Two notes. That is all it took. His theme for Jaws is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in cinema history, up there with anything he wrote for Star Wars or Indiana Jones. The genius of it is how simple it is. You hear those two alternating notes and your entire body responds before your brain catches up. Williams understood something fundamental about fear, that it lives in anticipation, not in the reveal.
What I love about rewatching Jaws is how patient it is. Spielberg was twenty seven years old and already understood that what you do not show is more powerful than what you do. The shark barely appears in the first half of the film, partly by design and partly because the mechanical shark kept breaking. That constraint turned into the movie's greatest strength.
If your movie night crew has not watched this in a while, this weekend is the one. It plays differently every time depending on where you are in life. When you are young it is a monster movie. When you are older it is a movie about a guy trying to do the right thing while everyone around him prioritizes money over safety. Either way, it is perfect.
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