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Jaws (1975)
In Steven Spielberg's summer blockbuster - his second-directed
feature film - it was a realistic science-fiction suspense/horror-disaster
film that tapped into the most primal of human fears - with the ominous,
driving, menacing 'da-dum...da-dum' score (of cellos) by composer
John William that brought on a great white's shark attacks:
- in the shocking opening scene set on Amity Island
in New England on the night of July 1st, carefree blonde Chrissie
Watkins (Susan Backlinie) left a late-night beach party to go skinny-dipping
and was devoured by being jerked underwater - prefaced by the shark's-eye
view of the legs of the nude swimmer
Opening Shark Attack on Chrissie Watkins (Susan
Backlinie)
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- newly-hired Amity police
chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) (transplanted from NYC) immediately
closed the beaches, but due to the upcoming July 4th holiday weekend,
the Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) insisted that the beaches
remain open to promote business (and not harm the approaching holiday
season), and pressured the coroner to agree that the shark attack
was only an accident
- as a worried and suspicious Brody sat and watched
warily toward the re-opened, crowded beach jammed with vacationers,
he personally witnessed the town's second shark attack; there was a startling close-up of
his face (a simultaneous dolly-in and zoom-out shot) as he observed how a young
Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees) on a yellow raft was bloodily attacked
- to rid the town of the shark threat, Mrs. Kintner
(Lee Fierro) - the mother of the devoured boy, offered a $3,000
dollar bounty to catch and kill the shark
- during a meeting among the town's elders (with
Brody) who assembled in a crowded Amity City schoolroom, Brody
was overruled when the Mayor announced the beaches would only be
closed for 24 hours
- shark-hating, salty and grizzled fisherman-hunter
Sam Quint (Robert Shaw) caught the tumultuous room's attention
during the community meeting - noisily screeching his fingernails
against a blackboard in the back of the room - and proposing that
he would exterminate the shark for $10,000 dollars; he bragged:
"You all know me. You know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this
bird for ya, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish! Not like goin'
down to the pond chasing bluegills or tommycats. This shark will
swallow you whole. Shakin'. Tenderizin'. Down you go. Now we got
to do it quick. That'll bring back the tourists and it'll put all
your businesses on a payin' basis. But it's not gonna be pleasant"
- during the frenzied search for the
shark by amateur shark hunters, marine biologist and shark
expert Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) arrived with little hope
that they would succeed ("They're all gonna die"); he
examined the remains of Chrissie in the morgue; he angrily pronounced: "This
was no boat accident!...It was a shark!"
- soon after, the shark-hunters returned with a tiger
shark - and Hooper was very doubtful that the smaller tiger shark
was responsible for Alex's death: ("The bite radius on
this animal is different than the wounds on the victim"); the Mayor
quickly planned to announce to tourists
and newspeople that the crisis was over
- Mrs. Kintner (Lee Fierro), dressed in funereal clothes,
angrily and silently slapped Brody's face, blaming him for her
son's death by not closing the beaches after the first shark attack:
("You knew there was a shark out there! You knew it was dangerous! But
you let people go swimming anyway? You knew all those things! But
still my boy is dead now. And there's nothing you can do about
it. My boy is dead. I wanted you to know that")
- in the evening at
the Brody dinner table, Police Chief Brody was detached and
guilt-ridden; Brody's son Sean (Jay Mello) copied his father's
worried gestures at the table and kissed his father at his request:
(Brody: "Give us a kiss," Son:
"Why?", Brody: "Because I need it")
- the next day, Hooper announced: "They caught a shark,
not the shark. Not the shark that killed Chrissie Watkins
and probably not the shark that killed the little boy"; Brody also
worried that the attacking shark wouldn't go away if people kept
swimming at the beach; after cutting open the insides of the tiger
shark, there was no evidence that it had attacked Alex Kintner
- during a nighttime search on Hooper's high-tech
oceanographic boat, the
film's most famous and shocking jump-scare was Hooper's underwater
view of the severed head of fisherman Ben Gardner (Craig
Kingsbury) (missing one eye) who suddenly appeared in a gaping
hole in his sunken, damaged and abandoned boat; there was evidence
of a shark-tooth embedded in the wooden hull, suggesting that Gardner's
and his boat had been victims of a great white shark
- the Mayor refused
to acknowledge that there was a shark problem, although his ignorance
of the problem was revealed when the great white shark attacked
boaters in an estuary-pond, and another victim was claimed (while
Brody's older son Michael who witnessed the attack narrowly escaped
injury himself); due to the most recent attack, the Mayor was convinced
to authorize the hiring of Quint (joined by Chief Brody and Hooper)
to hunt the shark on Quint's boat The Orca
- out on the open ocean, in a display
of competitive strength, Hooper single-handedly crushed his styrofoam
cup after Quint crushed his beer can
- there was a jolting first full view of the shark one
hour and twenty minutes into the film as Brody was throwing chum
into the ocean: ("Slow ahead! I can go slow ahead. Come on down
and chum some of this s--t!") -- his statement was followed
by Brody's dead-panned quip to Quint after jumping back, entering
the cabin, and offering his assessment: "You're gonna need a
bigger boat"; Quint estimated that the shark was 25 feet in
length and weighed 3 tons
- during their first evening on the boat, they experienced
a memorable drunken night of story-swapping (about scars); WWII
veteran Quint descriptively recalled the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and
the subsequent grisly shark attacks upon survivors in the water:
("Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves
into tight groups. You know, it was kinda like old squares in the
battle like that you see in the calendar named 'The Battle of Waterloo.'
And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and he starts
poundin' and hollerin' and screamin'. Sometimes the shark go away.
Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right
into ya, right into your eyes. Y'know, the thing about a shark, he's
got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes.
When he comes after ya, he doesn't seem to be livin' until he bites
ya, and those black eyes roll over white, and then - aww, then you
hear that terrible high-pitch screamin', the ocean turns red, and
in spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in
and rip ya to pieces....So, eleven hundred men went in the water,
three hundred and sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest,
June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb")
- in the lengthy finale, there was a monumental battle
with the shark from The Orca, that had been rammed by the great white shark; the strategy
was to harpoon the shark with ropes attached to heavy yellow barrels,
to both tire out the creature and to tracks its location
- the shark ate one of
the lines, pulled the ship around, and towed the Orca backwards,
filling the stern of the ship (and the engine compartments) with
water; as the boat lost its engine power and began to sink and break
up as it perilously listed, Hooper made a failed attempt to lethally
inject the shark with toxic strychnine from a protective shark-proof
cage placed underwater; the cage was battered and twisted by repeated
rammings, forcing Hooper to abandon the cage and hide behind an underwater rock
- meanwhile, the Giant Great
White jumped onto the stern of The Orca, and tilted the sinking
boat, leading to Quint's memorable death scene
as he slid down the slippery deck directly into the shark's mouth
while being bitten in half and stabbing at its eyes with a machete
The Death of Quint in Shark's Jaws After the Great
White Jumped onto The Orca's Stern
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- on the fast sinking boat, Brody was face to face
with the killer shark; he tossed one of Hooper's compressed air
tank cylinders into the monster's mouth; he then grabbed a rifle
and from the crow's nest of the almost-submerged vessel, Brody
aimed at the oxygen tank that the shark had
gripped in its jaws; he aimed and taunted
the shark: ("Show me the tank...Smile, ya son-of-a-bitch");
his rifle shot hit its target, causing a massive explosion
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The Explosive End of the Great White Shark
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- as the film concluded, Brody
and Hooper hand-paddled back to Amity Island's shore on the yellow
barrels (a makeshift raft), quipping with the film's last-lines:
(Brody: "I used to hate the water," with Hooper's reply "I can't
imagine why")
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Closeup Smash-Zoom of the Face of Police Chief Brody (Roy
Scheider)
The Shocking Shark Attack on Alex Kintner Witnessed by
Chief Brody
Brody with Young Son Sean (Jay Mello) at Dinner Table
Jump Scare - Underwater Floating Head of Fisherman Ben
Gardner in His Shark-Crushed Boat
Hooper's Crushing of Styrofoam Cup To Be Competitive with
Quint
First View of Shark Behind Brody
Brody: "You're gonna need a bigger boat"
Old Seafaring Quint's Recollections of the Sinking of
the USS Indianapolis
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