R-Rated Films Mistakenly Given a PG
Jaws
I figured I'd start off with the original summer blockbuster which made people afraid to sit on the toilet. Yes, Spielberg's breakthrough film was given lenient regard by the MPAA in 1975, and the proof prevails in the pudding before the credits stop their roll.
During the campfire scene on the beach, minutes before Susan Backlinie becomes victim one, there is clearly a joint being passed as the camera pans. We will address further PG-rated films where drug content is utilized, but this is where it began.
Back to Susan Backlinie, whose shark death stakes one of the most terrifying moments ever captured on film. Her demise is violent, disturbing, and decidedly too intense for minors, as is her full frontal nudity.
Yes, there is stark nudity in this film. The camera assumes the vantage point of the great white for a time, zooming in underwater enough to acknowledge Susan's birthday suit. I'm not trying to "Mr. Skin" Jaws, but jeez.
So let's advance to the gore and viscera. Susan's severed arm, jaggedly dismembered from her torso, is pulled out by Hooper during the autopsy, and it's pretty gruesome. Again, PG.
The little boy on the raft isn't shown as graphically, but the scuba sequence is just as eye-opening now as it was when I was eight watching this shit on VHS. The fisherman's glaring corpse is horrid; it took me years to open my eyes during this scene.
Severed limbs prevail again in the pond scene with the sailing instructor, whose capsized boat enables him to lose a leg. Gross.
We don't see the shark come get it again until Quint at the end, and thank God that's the remaining of the killings, because fuck if that isn't absolutely disturbing.
Quint's presence on film is an R-rated lean-to in of itself. For one, Robert Shaw was usually drunk during filming, and his language is very colorful, as are his sex jokes ("For fifteen years she kept her virginity...").
So, we got three components here which could have very well propelled this film into the R realm--nudity, severed limbs, and Quint. Spielberg and company got away with a lot in the seventies, and nowhere else is this as prevalent as in Jaws.
