Steven Spielberg is one of the most skilled and certainly the most influential filmmaker of the modern era. His ability to create memorable scenes and to squeeze every ounce of entertainment value out of even weak material has earned him the plaudits of audiences for the past three decades. Even his misses, such as Hook, Amistad, and his adaptation of War of the Worlds, are worth watching for what Spielberg is able to put on the screen. His best works are well judged to be classics of the cinematic art.

Jaws

There were surely big event movies before Jaws. 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Godfather come to mind. But in the summer of 1975, Jaws defined what would become the summer blockbuster ever since. Tens of millions of people would line up for hours for the privilege of being scared out of their wits by a great white shark.

The story is a conventional one, a monster movie about a shark that terrorizes a resort town of Amity Island. What causes the film to transcend its material is what Spielberg does with it. At first we don’t see the monster, but rather its first victim, a beautiful woman who takes a midnight swim. We see the horror and pain on her face as the shark attacks from below, a brief moment of seeming deliverance as she grabs the buoy, and then her final destruction as she is dragged down to be devoured alive.

The horror is steadily ratcheted up as more attacks occur during the town’s summer tourist season. While Police Chief Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, quickly realizes that the beach has become the feeding ground of a great white shark, the local business community remains, for a while, in denial.

Finally, the town is forced to hire the services of a shark hunter named Quint, played by the late Robert Shaw. Quint is the most interesting character of the movie (aside from the shark). He’s a gruff, old salt whose life was changed forever by the fact that he was a member of the crew of the World War II ship the Indianapolis. The Indianapolis, having delivered the atomic bombs that ended the war to Tinian Island, was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Most of the crew went into the water with life jackets and were picked off one by one by schools of sharks for several days until the wreck was discovered and the survivors rescued. Quint obviously has a grudge against sharks that matches Captain Ahab’s grudge against the great white whale, Moby Dick.

Quint, accompanied by Brody and Matt Hooper, a scientist and shark expert played by Richard Dreyfuss, set forth to find and kill the great white and the movie truly comes into it’s own. The duel between the three men on board the fragile fishing boat and the shark, with its scenes of claustrophobic suspense, provides some of the most riveting—and frightening—film entertainment ever put on the screen.