duh...duh...duh....duuuuuuu..dduuuuuuuu

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2003)

John Williams score was one of the spookiest sounds that I have ever heard. No wonder that this movie cleared the beaches when it came out in the summer of 1975. Steven Spielburg has directed so many fine films, but this is his finest. He knew how to make a first class thriller just like Alfred Hitchcock did. Spielburg did such a wonderful job with Jaws because when you think about it, you didn't really see that much blood and gore and you did not see the shark until almost the end of the film. Steve shied away from using bloody special effects the way that so many directors of these cheap slasher films do today and I think that made it a better movie. He just used things like the spooky music to make you hide your eyes in fright in anticipation of what might happen. This is one of the few films that is better then the book. Roy Schider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus make a dynamite trio. They do such a wonderful job that it is hard to tell who steals the show from who. When you think about it, they have to carry the last half of the movie all by themselves and they do it so well. I read that Shaw and Dreyfus didn't like each other during the filming, but that made it even better. I do not know if people realize this, but that speech about the USS Indianapolis that Quint makes is based on fact. There really was such a ship and Robert Shaw (who was an accomplished writer and playwright) insisted on writing this himself. He should have gotten an Oscar for this amazing soliloquy who gives. The USS Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser that delivered the uranium for the atomic bomb to the island of Tinian. On the way back, it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. There were 1,196 men on the ship, based on the accounts survivors gave after they were rescued, it is estimated as many as 400 may have gone down with it. The men were in the water for five days before they were finally rescued! By some sort of SNAFU, no one reported the ship as missing and they were found only by accident. After all that time, only 316 came out alive and about 100 of the casualties had been eaten by sharks.