Jaws became a cultural phenomenon and the first bona fide summer event film.

Rating: 10/10 (15 November 2010)

Television had taught director Steven Spielberg to grab the audience in the opening sequence, but Duel (1971) had shown him that our fear of the unseen dictates that our direct confrontation with the giant shark should be delayed. Spielberg's brilliantly edited and scored film unfolds in three classically conceived acts. The film carefully balances suspense and humour, provides the police chief with a believable home life, creates credible characters in Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and something controversially legendary in Quint (Robert Shaw). Several things give the film an extra dimension. First, the picture came out in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the biggest cover-up and public deception in American political history, and playing the craven Mayor of Amity is Murray Hamilton, an actor associated with devious authority figures, most famously Mr. Robinson in The Graduate (1967). The second is the teaming of a uniformed policeman and a bearded hippie as the principled opponents of a dishonest community. The third factor, the one that gives true depth to Jaws, is the revelation that Quint was a survivor of the Indianapolis, the American warship torpedoed in July 1945 after delivering the A-bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. As he eloquently recalls, nearly 800 sailors out of a crew of 1100 perished while clinging to wreckage, most killed by sharks. The thriller is many things: a high point in the 1970s group-jeopardy cycle; a Hitchcockian horror picture for the carriage trade; the massive box-office hit that established the reputation of Spielberg; and the film that created a new fashion for releasing films nationally with several thousand prints.