Spielberg invents the summer blockbuster

Rating: 9/10 (22 November 2009)

According to the National Safety Council, you're more likely to perish through "fireworks" than being chewed like bubblegum by a great white (especially if you live in, say, Ryegate). But during the summer of 1975, parents could have been forgiven for blaming their children's aversion to water on the precociously young director, who might as well have developed his classic Hitchcockian eco-thriller in tandem with the British government as a means of enforcing the hosepipe ban during the following year's drought. Jaws has it all: that John Williams score, fantastic character actors, a proper grown-up story, and a mechanical shark that refused to work so many times they had to keep it out of sight; the definition of making lemonade out of lemons.