Wanted Dead Or Alive

 
The next scene begins with a close up of a notice on a bulletin board offering 'a $3000.00 bounty to the man or men who catch and kill the shark that killed Alex M. Kintner on Sunday 29th June on the Amity Town Beach.' In 1974 inflation in the US peaked at 7% and President Ford announced a Whip Inflation Now initiative to encourage Americans to exercise greater financial restraint by saving more and spending less. A 1974 dollar would be worth almost five times as much in 2011 so Mrs Kintner's offer should be multiplied accordingly if you want to get a true sense of the value she placed on her son's life. It's a rarely mentioned point of irony that it is Chief Brody - the man she blames for the tragedy - who is ultimately entitled to collect the blood money. It's fitting, therefore, that as the town's sheriff, with his pistol holstered at his hip, he is the closest character in the story to the Wild West image of the bounty hunter.

The message of the notice is unequivocal and the language is echoed in Quint's remark ('I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten.'). The offer is directed at the males of the community, and both the singular and plural forms of the noun are used. Brody will later claim during a drunken speech to Hooper that Amity is a town in which 'one man can make a difference', but in the end it is the combined effort of the three shark hunters that allows them to prevail.

As the locals gather around the bulletin board - where the sign has been pinned up to partially  mask an official looking announcement containing the word proclamation - there is still some dispute as to the veracity of Mrs Kintner's claim. One of the voices describes Alex as 'the kid who was missing at the beach' and the voice of Mrs Taft seems to be taking the Amity party line when she says, 'We don't even know that there is a shark around here.' Her use of the plural pronoun, echoing the elderly bather on the beach, again illustrates how individuals speak as representatives of the whole community.

Just as Chrissie Watkins's death was marked by a document (the coroner's report) so too is Alex Kintner's: both texts identify the manner of death (shark attack), the time (in both cases, erroneous), and the place. The text of the reward sign is clearly printed in something resembling Comic Sans font and the margins look almost justified - it's unlikely that the distraught Mrs Kintner would have been able to write with such a steady hand, and the most logical explanation for such neat penmanship is that she got Polly to do the printing.

Get Out Of The Water

There is a cut from the dolly-zoom reaction shot of Brody to a shot of a group of children staring at the red stained water. A football - one of the defining symbols of US culture - has been dropped by one of the boys and it circles in the bloody maelstrom created by the attack. This small detail suggests what the panic on the Fourth of July scene will later make explicit: that it is the American way of life which is under threat from the monster. The terrified children are positioned much closer to the scene of the attack than in earlier shots, where Alex was further out, but sometimes continuity has to be sacrificed for dramatic purposes.

The camera cuts back to the beach where a couple are seen walking down to the water and pointing. Brody races past them in the foreground, but stops at the water's edge from where he shouts commands like a basketball coach at the court's sideline. The other adults, unaware of what has actually happened, run past him into the sea. Brody moves crabwise along the beach, shouting and gesticulating and then there is a cutaway shot to Mrs Kintner - partially obscured by the legs of running adults - as she raises herself up from her towel. There follows a series of cuts that alternate the point of view from the beach and the water as parents rescue their children, including a shot of Ellen Brody looking back nervously over her shoulder as she guides son Michael to the safety of the shore. Another cutaway shot shows Sean sitting by his ruined sandcastle, calling for his brother to get out of the water. There's a final shot of a young boy being literally dragged from the sea and then we are on the beach again as the last few bathers run up the sand past Brody. The music that accompanies this scene of panic builds up a frantic rhythm and then stutters to an end.

In the aftermath we see Mrs Kintner moving through the crowd calling her son's name. When she reaches the surf she makes a full 360 degree turn and then another half turn, a physical representation of her own sense of disorientation. Placing a hand on the crown of her head to prevent the wind from blowing off her yellow sunhat, she walks up the beach towards the camera, a look of desperation on her face.
 

There is then a cut to a shot of the torn remains of Alex's yellow raft washed up in the bloodied surf. It's not clear that Mrs Kintner sees this detail. The last shot of her shows her with her sight line directed out to the ocean and not at her feet. Furthermore, the framing of the final shot (with the waves on the left of the screen and the beach on the right) would not match her point of view. The image - rather like the dog's abandoned stick floating on the water - is a potent one, and provides a bloody punctuation mark to what is one of the film's most carefully constructed scenes.

Vertigo

The shot of a struggling Alex Kintner being pulled under by the shark is obscured by billowing clouds of his own blood, just as the mutilated corpse of the shark will later obliterate the screen with a cloudy red. The camera cuts to a shot of Brody's reaction. He is positioned in the dead centre of the screen with his wife immediately behind him. On either side of the frame are grassy sand dunes, and in the background, separating the land from a strip of blue sky, are the blurry slats of the same kind of fencing that dominated the movie's opening scene. The shadow of a beach hut darkens the bottom left corner of the frame.

In the novel Brody learns of the second attack by telephone, experiencing first a 'twinge of unease [in his] stomach' before feeling 'flushed, almost feverish.' The film reproduces this sickening sensation through a camera movement in which the character and the background seem to be operating in different dimensions. The image pushes in towards Brody so that his head and shoulders occupy marginally more of the frame. At the same time the strip of sand behind him seems to stretch like rubber. In contrast to the movement towards the seated figure of the chief, there appears at the same time to be a movement away from his position that allows elements previously unseen (such as the side of one of the beach huts) to become visible within the frame.

It doesn't require any great technical knowledge of film making to know that if you move a camera closer to an object, it will occupy more of the image space, and that if you move it away from the object it will show more of the surroundings. What this shot - known as a dolly zoom - does is combine the two concepts into a single image, creating a distorting push-me-pull-you effect. The shot was first used in commercial cinema by Alfred Hitchcock for scenes in Vertigo to convey the paralysing effects of Scottie Ferguson's fear of heights. Hitchcock explained the origin and the development of the idea to Francois Truffaut in the Sixties:

'I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me. I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn't do it. The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and the zoom simultaneously [...] so that's the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.'

Interestingly, although Vertigo was released in 1958 there were no immediate imitations of the effect by other filmmakers. In fact, Jaws was the movie that helped establish it as a device for conveying shock, and it has been much used since then - to the extent that today it has become enough of a cliche to be the object of irony. Spielberg used the shot in later films (including E.T and Schindler's List) and it was also employed by John Landis for the moment when Michael Jackson is transformed into a zombie in his Thriller video.

Brody's moment of vertigo is accompanied by a distorting string effect in the music score, just as Hitchcock had used Bernard Herrmann's frenzied harp glissandi to underline the drama of his shot. The distorted perspective not only induces a feeling of unease in the viewer, but also serves to highlight Brody's own sense of helplessness. He is literally rooted to the spot, momentarily unable to move.

There Will Be Blood

The death of Alex Kintner is swifter but bloodier than that of Chrissie Watkins. The shark rises from the depths, ignoring the legs of the child bathers and homing in directly on the raft and the kicking limbs that propel it. (It's said that the reason surfers are often attacked by sharks is that the outline their boards and outstretched limbs form closely resembles the image of a seal in distress.) On the soundtrack the throbbing cello music - punctuated with shrill flute figures - pulses faster as the camera closes in, and just as it seems it is about to collide with the boy's knees there is a cut back to the surface. In the foreground is a group of splashing children and beyond them in the middle distance we glimpse the shark taking the boy. The image lasts only three seconds. What we see is what Nigel Andrews in his analysis of the scene calls 'a windmilling flurry of dark movement.' There's not enough time - certainly on a first viewing - to make sense of the visual information, and this is underlined by the fact that the one witness on the beach, who rises from his spot next to Mrs Kintner, cries out, 'Did you see that?'

Careful re-watching with the aid of the freeze frame does, however, refute Andrews's claim that  'you can see Jaws again and again and still not work out the components of that abstract ballet.' In fact, the conical shape to the right is clearly that of the shark's huge snout and is a ghost of the image of pictures taken on set that show the filmmakers' original intention of showing more of the mechanical shark before technical problems determined otherwise. Perhaps to make up for the absense of the monster, Spielberg felt the need to provide a gushing fountain of blood and to add to the horror by cutting to an underwater close up of the boy drowning in his own gore.
 

Commenting on why he eventually vetoed a longer and more explicit version of the attack on the estuary victim, Spielberg expressed a sense of reserve ('It was too bloody so I cut it out.') although the outtake footage, which can be seen as a DVD extra, seems quite tame when compared to the Scanners-like explosion of blood and guts that ends little Alex's life.

Pippet

There is a brief cutaway shot of Michael and Sean Brody running down the beach before the camera is back on their parents. Ellen, playfully addressing her husband as Chief Brody, moves behind his chair and proceeds to give him a neck massage as an MOR song plays on the radio. Their positions will be reversed in the later scene when Ellen tries to take Brody's mind off the shark books he has been reading by leaning back against him. Just as Brody succumbs to his wife's coaxing, there follows an abrupt series of cuts of the children playing in the water. Each cut is timed with a splash to develop a staccato rhythm. This is then contrasted with a low angle shot of the beach that frames the boy in the lemon polo shirt on the left and young Sean Brody on the right.

Sean is making sandcastles and singing ('Do you know the muffin man?') to himself. The boy in the lemon shirt is standing in the surf, turning to the left and to the right and calling his dog's name. The camera then cuts to a medium shot of the upper body of the boy in profile against an empty expanse of green/grey sea. As he calls 'Pippet! Come on, Pippet!' he turns to face the ocean and presents his back to the camera, the yellow of his shirt providing a subliminal signal for danger. To leave us in no doubt as to Pippet's fate, there is a cut to the stick bobbing on the water, and then a cut to below the surface, which the throbbing music on the soundtrack makes immediately clear is a POV shot of the shark.

Given the size of its bite radius, it's quite likely that the fish could have swallowed the labrador in one gulp and ingested it before it realised it was covered in fur. Then again, one of the principal components of a Great White's diet is seal, and seals have fur. Being a dog lover, Spielberg (whose own hound Elmer played the role of the Brody's spaniel) would never have thought of showing a canine death, but he was also canny enough to know that less is often more, and that the simple shot of a stick floating in the waves was enough to goose the audience up a little.

Aquaphobia

There is a low angle shot of the group of children splashing into the sea with Alex Kintner further out, revolving on his raft. The next shot shows Brody from a slightly different angle, one which accentuates the diminishing perspective of the orange and white striped beach huts that stretch the width of the screen behind him and end at a green-roofed pagoda. Mrs Taft sits with her arm around her husband on the left of the screen and the two of them look smilingly on at the children at play out of shot. An elderly man in blue bathing trunks and black bathing cap (earlier mistaken for a shark fin) comes and sits in front of Brody and begins drying his drooping chest with a yellow towel. There is a cut to a reverse angle behind Brody that positions the back of the chief's head on the right of the frame with the elderly bather just right of centre and the splashing children in the water dominating the left.

The old man's single line of dialogue ('We know all about you, chief. You don't go in the water at all, do you?') is the first specific reference to Brody's aquaphobia, which his wife will later try to psychoanalyse ('I guess it's a childhood thing.'). The use of the first person plural pronoun suggests that the old man is speaking on behalf of the whole island (indeed, Amity's population up to this point does seem to be well represented by elderly white males), and also tells us that in such a small community no secrets can be kept for long. Brody's reaction to the old man's playful needling seems unnecessarily harsh: he uncrosses his leg, shifts his chair to the left and dismisses him with the line, 'That's some bad hat, Harry.' He will similarly dismiss his wife's later attempts to explain away his phobia ('There's a clinical name for it, isn't there?') with a curt put-down ('Drowning.), which suggests he remains sensitive about his weak spot.

It's a matter of record that some of the dialogue in Jaws was improvised in rehearsals and then worked into the script proper by Carl Gottleib, Brody's 'bigger boat' line being the most oft-quoted example. I can't help feeling that the 'bad hat, harry' remark was another piece of improv. The line has taken on a life of its own outside the film as the name of Jaws-fan Bryan Singer's production company, whose production credit logo - which appears at the end of every episode of House, M.D - reproduces the scene in a Beavis and Butthead style animation.

Parenthood

As Taft returns to his own wife and child, Ellen Brody offers her husband some words of comfort. The framing of the shot, with Brody on the right of the screen in profile and Ellen facing him at a right angle, is one of several such devices in the film that places the wife in a supporting role. In most of her scenes, Ellen is there to provide her husband with either an offer of physical relief ('Wanna get drunk and fool around?'), food (at the dinner table) or medical aid ('The Blistex is in the kit.'), and to defer to his authority ('Michael! Did you hear your father? Out of the water! Now!').

With her strapless swimsuit cropped by the lower part of the frame, Ellen's naked shoulders recall those of the shark's first victim. Her floppy straw hat and Jackie O sunglasses give her the appearance of a glamorous mom. Her headgear may, in fact, be a detail designed to contrast her with the rather frumpy Mrs Kintner. In expressing concern for her sons, she once again defers to her husband ('Listen, if the kids going in the water is worrying you ...') and as the children in the background get up and go down to the ocean, she takes her husband's hand in hers, their shared fist momentarily obscuring her face. By the time it came to Jaws: The Revenge, Ellen had abandoned any sense of reticence and was in full Ripley-mode, taking out the Great White with an improvised harpoon.

In Benchley's novel, Brody's three sons (Billy, Martin and Sean) are never in the water with the shark. Spielberg, who would go on to put children at the centre of many of his subsequent movies, could not resist the urge to add adolescent peril to the mix. In Jaws, at least, it is incidental to the plot and does help to provide the main character's motivation for hunting down the shark. By the time he got to Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World, the director had more of less surrendered to his own sentimentality and the box-office imperative that increasingly requires blockbuster movies to feature protagonists close to the age of their target audience.

Hey Marty

Brody is interrupted in his shark spotting by Mrs Taft's husband. Mr Taft, a middle-aged businessman, interposes his tanned bulk between the chief and the ocean so that Brody has to look over the man's shoulder to keep his eye on the water activity. Taft's big head looms on the right of the frame and the tiny head of a girl swimmer - just a speck in the water - is in the far background on the left. The split focus gives a sense of depth and ensures that the viewer's attention, like Brody's, is held by the smaller of the two images within the frame.

The second false alarm occurs when the girl swimmer cries out as if taken by something below the surface. She rears up out of the water on the shoulders of her boyfriend, her scream more playful than fearful. Brody again raises himself out of his chair in reaction, settling back down when he realises his mistake. Taft, unaware of the threat, is more concerned with mundane matters. His little monologue of complaint about parking misdemeanours encapsulates the small town nature of Amity police work and also hints at the way those in authority are manipulated by those with influence ('You can take care of it. You've done it before.').

Taft's idiolect ('I've got some cats parking in front of the house') betrays his age as much as his greying hair, and his use of the overly-familiar form of Brody's first name may also be a hangover from the Fifties.

Bad Hat

 
Brody is distracted by two red herrings (one visual and one aural) before the real fish strikes without warning. The first is a black shape in the water just beyond the overweight woman. There is a cut to Brody's anxious reaction as he raises himself slightly from his seated position and then a shot that reveals the suspected fin to be nothing more than the black bathing cap of another of Amity's elderly residents. Another reaction shot shows Brody looking askance with a mixture of relief and self admonition. As a participant in the action, Brody has no visual or aural clues that will help him identify the presence of the shark. For him every suspicious movement in the water could be a threat. As viewers of the action, the audience, however, has been primed by the opening scene to associate the shark with an underwater POV shot and the throbbing music of the score. Although we do not feel the same misplaced anxiety as the main character, there remains a tension throughout the scene that dervies from the fact that we know something must happen, and we too, like Brody, are on the edge of our seats.

Wipe Out

Having established the geography of the beach with fluid tracking shots, Spielberg adopts a series of quick cuts that set up a number of bathers as potential shark food. The first  - a POV from Brody's perspective - is a medium shot of the overweight lady floating on her back. The young man with the lemon polo shirt runs across the frame from left to right, obscuring the view, and then we cut to a medium close up as he throws the stick for his dog. This, and the following shots that are all seen from varying low angles, are clearly not intended to be showing what Brody is seeing. In pursuit of the stick the dog races into the water, where a young couple is canoodling in the shallows. There is another cut to Mrs Kintner in profile as Alex runs past her with his raft, and this is followed by another low angle shot as the boy launches himself onto the ocean. With each shot the camera has become closer to the water so that as viewers we almost feel as if we are in it as well. The next shot is of the dog swimming with the stick in his mouth and being intercepted by a male bather. Then we cut back to the overweight lady, still kept afloat by her bulk and slowly turning in a clockwise direction. Another cut to Alex on his raft, propelling himself with kicks of his legs and a two-armed paddle stroke. The images are accompanied by the sound of splashing and water activity.

The next cut returns us to dry land with a medium shot looking along the beach from a reverse angle to the establishing one. A song on the radio provides ambient background music. The beach - a crescent of white sand - is almost deserted and the most conspicuous items on it are two more empty lifeguard stations. The boy and his dog are having a playful tug-of-war. There is a travelling shot of the dog prancing in surf, and then we cut to a medium shot of Brody. He has shifted his position to one side of his chair and leans his right elbow over the back of the metal frame. His hands are clasped - just as they will later be in the dinner table scene with his son - and his right leg is crossed in a manly fashion over his left. His posture suggests something between relaxation and attentiveness. It is almost as if he is literally on the edge of his seat, waiting for something to happen.

Abandoning the rapid cutting technique, Spielberg now moves from shot to shot with clever imitation wipes. A bather passes in front of the camera, briefly obscuring our view of the watchful police chief. As the bather moves out of the frame we are aware that the shot has moved in closer. Another passer-by wipes the screen and we move even closer. The combination of the 'wipe' and the cut create a single fluid image. Compare this scene to Mrs Brenner's discovery of the eyeless corpse in The Birds where Hitchcock creates a jarring effect by cutting closer on the same image. In Frenzy the same director used an imitation wipe to cheat in the creation of a long travelling shot: watch for the moment when the Covent Garden porter passes across the frame with a sack of potatoes, seamlessly joining together studio and location work. 


In the grammar of film a cut can be used within scenes or to move from scene to scene. Traditionally, a fade or dissolve is used to indicate the passing of time and as such is rarely used within a single scene (although, off the top of my head, I can think of examples in Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver). A wipe is most frequently used to indicate both a change of time and location, or - in this beach scene- as a sleight of hand, like some of the camera tricks of Georges Melies. Like the Iris-in and Iris-out of the silents, the wipe has become rare in modern cinema unless it is being used in a post-modernist ironic way, or - as in the Star Wars movies - as a kind of retro throwback.

Spielberg uses cuts when he allows us to be the observer of the action and 'wipes' when he wants us to watch it through Brody's eyes. The contrast of the staccato rhythm of the former and the perceived fluidity of the latter helps to create a kinetic tension that builds to the 'Vertigo moment' when the screen seems to expand and contract at the same time.

It's Only An Island If You Look At It From The Water

On his way to collect his raft from the beach hut, Alex Kintner passes Ellen Brody, who is sunbathing on the beach and conversing with a dark-haired woman (Mrs Taft according to the IMDB credits, but anonymous in the movie itself). Snatches of inconsequential dialogue can be heard, but it is Ellen's question ('When do I get to become an islander?') and Mrs Taft's response ('Never! You're not born here, you're not an islander.') that register.

In Benchley's novel the town of Amity is located on the western end of Long Island, a twenty-minute drive from Sag Harbor. Long Island somewhat belies its geographical status by lying flush against the mainland and being connected to it by both bridges and tunnels. When you look at it from the water or even from space, its large mass of almost one and a half thousand square miles looks more like a peninsula. In the movie Amity becomes an island unto itself, more akin to Martha's Vineyard, which was where the film was shot and which looks like an island from wherever you view it. In fact, although nominally set in a recognisable east coast location, Amity is about as real as the village of Brigadoon or that other famous Scottish village from Local Hero.

In the novel Brody is a local, but finds himself increasingly isolated from his community - a story element that was emphasised by the publisher's hype (... one man against a giant killer shark and a town that won't face the truth!). In the film, Brody is an off-islander, figuratively and - at the movie's climax - literally out of his depth, but he finds unlikely companionship in his quest to kill the shark. At the very end of the movie he is reunited with Hooper and the two men share a brief moment of poignancy as they acknowledge Quint's sacrifice with a realisation that no man is an island.

Watching The Detective

 
Alex walks towards the beach huts to get his raft, stepping between reclining sunbathers. The camera moves with him and halts as the profile of Brody comes into view in the foreground, dominating the right side of the frame. The concentrated stillness of the chief's gaze sets him apart from the rest of the people of the beach, and his right hand is held to his mouth in a typical gesture of deep thought. His posture can also be read as an emblem of his complicity in the cover-up of the first attack: forbidden to speak, he is, at least, determined to be on the lookout for any further threat.

The scene is as much about Brody being watched as it is about him watching. Shots alternate between what he sees and his reactions to it in a textbook example of the Kuleshov effect. As an audience we share with him the knowledge that none of the other participants in the scene have, and so his heightened expressions of dread become ours. In a sense, we are watching our own reactions up on the screen.

Throughout much of the movie, Brody is placed in the position of observer. At key moments he directs his gaze out towards the ocean, and - particularly in the presence of Hooper - he is relegated to the role of onlooker, first as the fish expert delivers medical analysis in the morgue scene, then fillets the tiger shark in a 'half-assed autopsy', and later explores Ben Gardner's half-submerged boat.

Brody sits in his chair throughout almost the entire scene: what, after all, could be more emblematic of an observer than a seated posture? Even when there is an appearance of a threat, Brody does nothing more drastic than half-rise to a crouching position, and when his view is blocked he simply shifts his beach chair a few inches in irritation. Even at the moment of the attack, he remains rooted to the spot - it is the camera and indeed the image that react with movement.

That Little Kintner Boy

As the overweight lady walks into the sea she passes a young man in cut off jeans and a pale lemon polo shirt, who is playing with his black labrador in the surf. He throws a stick into the ocean and the dog races after it. A skinny boy in red bathing trunks (the same fire engine red as the boat of the estuary victim) emerges from the sea. The camera reverses its right-to-left movement and follows him up the beach until he plops down in front of a woman, whose face is hidden by a floppy yellow sun hat. Their brief exchange hints at the prickly relationship of a nervous child and an over-protective mother. Interestingly, the boy's name is telegraphed to the audience, just as the first victim called out her own name minutes before her death.

Given a final ten minutes on the water (and, in fact, a final few minutes of life), Alex Kintner gets up and walks further up the beach. The camera follows him, pulling back to reveal more of the background where we can see first one and then two tall lifeguard chairs, both unoccupied and facing the ocean. Painted the same white as the picket fences, they are totems of a false sense of security.

In the book, Alex is six years old, but in the movie he's ten or eleven, more or less the same age as Brody's elder son. He was played by twelve year old local Jeffrey Voorhees, who coincidentally shares the same surname as another iconic movie monster. Mrs Kintner also seems to have been aged for the movie version - at times, she looks old enough to be the young boy's grandmother. Played by another local (Lee Fierro), the actress was, in fact, forty five when she was cast in the role. Benchley never fully describes her in the book, but the illustrated Reader's Digest version of the novel portrays her as a leggy blonde with Jackie O. sunglasses and a DePalma transvestite psycho fright wig.

Super Size Me

The ferry scene concludes with an abrupt cut to a crowded beach. There is no establishing wide shot and it is only after the camera has panned and tracked across the entire beach that we get some sense of the geography of the scene. The first figure we see is that of an overweight woman. Dressed in a striped bathing costume, she strides purposefully into the ocean, the skin on her arms and legs puckered and wrinkled by folds of fat. This was no doubt intended to provoke an ironic smile, but the potential for developing the 'people as food' motif would have to wait until Jeannot Szwarc cut together a montage of plump holidaymakers snacking on hot dogs for his beach scene in Jaws 2.

Back in the 1970s obesity levels in the US were not as high as they are today, and - with the exception of a few well-fed selectmen and some beer-bellied fishermen - there is no much evidence of a weight problem in Amity. Indeed, if you look at the figures scrambling out of the sea during the Fourth of July panic, it's difficult to see any evidence of bad diet.

Did You See That?

There are three beach scenes in Jaws, each one providing a backdrop to a shark attack: the first, Chrissie Watkins; the second, Alex Kintner; the third, the unnamed estuary victim. The beach - like the darkened auditorium in which the moviegoer sits - is an arena for observation. The onlookers are forced into the role of audience, a role which precludes them from taking any action to prevent the outcome of events. In the first scene, Cassidy lies in a drunken stupour, oblivious to the horror taking place beyond the water's edge. In the second, the chief of police watches for but does not see the shark, and the only witness of the attack is not even sure what he sees. In the third, the entire community of Amity looks on as the hapless boatman is devoured, but even the grandstanding spectacle of his bloody death is not enough to hold the attention of a trio of bored girls sunbathing on the shore.

More than a geographical location, the shore (which, incidentally, is both the last word of the novel and the final image of the film) marks the division between the security of the land and the threat that lies beneath the surface of the water. Amity being a summer town, the beach is also the focus of economic transaction. The Fourth of July scene opens with examples of how the enterprising islanders are quick to turn a crisis into a sales opportunity, installing Shark Attack video games on the sea front and selling souvenir shark jaws.

The pacing and filming of each beach scene are significantly different. The first - with its relentless tracking shots - moves inevitably towards death whilst the third, burdened with multiple storylines, almost collapses under its own narrative complexity. It is in the second beach scene, however, that Spielberg manages to achieve a perfect balance and creates four minutes of tension that is unequalled in the rest of the movie.

The scene as filmed contains the essential action beats that were there in Benchley's novel: the crowded beach, the bored boy, the irritable mother - even the witness to the attack ('Did you see that?') - all are faithfully transferred from page to screen. The significant difference, however, is the presence of Brody, and it is his nervous, watchful gaze that informs the way we perceive the action. There are two parallel streams of visual information running through the sequence: the things that Brody sees (and the way he [mis]interprets them) and the things the viewer sees. This dichotomy - similar to the one Hitchcock creates between viewer and James Stewart's character in Rear Window - serves to ratchet up the tension. A dark shape in the water that might be a fin turns out to be an old man's bathing hat, and a young girl's sudden scream is the result not of a shark attack but horseplay. Brody sees evidence of the threat where there is none and yet fails to notice the key signifier - the dog's stick bobbing unclaimed in the waves - that telegraphs the presence of the shark to the viewer even before the underwater POV camera and throbbing music score make it explicit.

Barracuda

Nothing demonstrates the slippery nature of Larry Vaughn's character more that the way he inveigles Brody into keeping the beaches open. His language hovers somewhere between concern and coercion ('We're really a little anxious that you're rushing into something serious here. It's your first summer, you know.') and he speaks in the rehearsed soundbites of a practised politician ('Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars.'). His initial  approach is to place the economic imperative above the need for civic responsibility ('If the people can't swim here, they'll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island.'). When Brody rejects this argument, the mayor enlists the help of Meadows and Santos, and the three conspirators begin to weave their cover story.

Whilst the newspaper man is adamant in his claim ('We never had that kind of trouble in these waters.'), the medical examiner is clearly less comfortable with the deception - possibly because he has seen the evidence of the girl's remains. Even as he constructs the story of a boating accident, his hesitant delivery (Well, I think possibly, yes, a boating accident.') betrays his mendacity. Just as Meadows's line will be echoed later on the dock by Brody in a moment of self-delusion ('There's no other sharks like this in these waters!'), so Santos's phrase will be thrown back in his face by Hooper ('This was no boat accident.'). Having made their contributions, the two men literally distance themselves from the mayor by moving away in the same order in which they first appeared in the earlier street scene, leaving Vaughn to draw Brody conspiratorially closer to the camera.

Vaughn is quick to develop a persuasive narrative in a series of short present tense sentences that avoid any unpleasantness ('A summer girl goes swimming. Swims out a little far. She tires. A fishing boat comes along...') and reduce the victim to a nameless cipher. Brody, growing defensive of his own position, begins to waver, and the mayor caps his argument with one of the movie's great quotes: 'It's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says "Huh? What?" You yell shark, and we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.'

Although there is a certain truth to the phrase (barracudas do occasionally injure bathers), it's such a piece of bizarre logic that Brody seems to accept dumbly. The line will, of course, come back to bite the mayor in the rear when the very scenario he warns against is realised. For the moment, though, he is in command and - the boy scout swimmers conveniently forgotten - orders the ferryman to take them back to the other side of the bay.

Conspiracy Theory

By 1975 the Watergate scandal had exposed political corruption at the highest level of government, and the nation's sense of distrust of those in power was being reflected in popular culture. Some movies (The Parallax View, Chinatown and The Conversation) addressed the notions of conspiracy head on whilst others (The Towering Inferno, and, of course, Jaws) exploited the prevailing mood of the country mainly for narrative purposes. Whilst Larry Vaughn is often seen as the movie's emblem of Machiavellianism, it is, in fact, the shadowy figure of the medical examiner who best represents everything that is rotten in the state of Amity.

In the novel he is a voice on the end of the phone. His name - Carl Santos - sets him apart from the community's predominantly WASPish population, and his brief conversation with Brody (with whom he is on first name terms) suggests that he is probably of the same generation as the chief. In the movie, he is an old man, clearly past retirement age but still clinging on to his office. In appearance - particularly the thick-framed glasses that conveniently mask his face - he resembles Henry Kissinger, but in his awkward body language he reminds us of a perspiring Richard Nixon. There's even a hint of Nixon in his line 'I was wrong. We'll have to amend our reports.'

When he climbs out of the car and stands behind Brody, he puts one foot defiantly on the ferry's kerb, but when pressed for a revised opinion ('Boat propeller?'), he folds his arms defensively and pushes his glasses back up his nose. As the mayor tries to persuade the police chief of the need to keep the beaches open, the medical examiner literally turns his back on the discussion and distances himself from it by walking to the end of the ferry. Later, when forced to confront his own duplicity ('This was no boat accident!'), he makes the same defensive arm gesture and looks down.

Smorgasbord

Brody nervously paces the deck and takes a drag on his cigarette. A car horn sounds behind him but - preoccupied by the swimmers - he ignores it and does not even turn as the ferry rocks under the weight of the boarding vehicle. First out of the car on the passenger side is the Mayor, followed by Meadows from behind the wheel and the medical examiner from the back seat. The three men converge on Brody as he tosses his half smoked cigarette over the side. Another man - later seen on the beach 'trying to absorb some of the sun' - climbs out of the far side of the vehicle with Hendricks, and the two of them remain in the background engaged in conversation. Hendricks, in keeping with his boyish character, leans on the roof of the car and grins innocently as he looks on at his boss having his arm gently twisted.

Although the talky scene that follows is filmed in one take from a static camera, there is an energy to it generated by three interacting kinetic elements: the movement of the background as the ferry crosses the bay, the carefully planned choreography of the actors within the frame, and the overlap and interplay of the dialogue. Later in the movie a companion scene - also shot in a single take - will play out between Brody, Hooper and Vaughn in front of the defaced billboard.

In the ferry scene Vaughn has the upper hand and Brody is literally pressed up against the fence, hemmed in by the mayor and his factotums. Not only do they physically surround the chief, but they also gang up on him with words. When Brody directs a question at Vaughn, Meadows answers it. When Vaughn invites the medical examiner to give his opinion, he puts the words ('Boat propeller?') into his mouth. Brody initially resists the pressure ('That doesn't mean we have to serve them up as smorgasbord.'), but quickly gives in to the combination of Vaughn's professed avuncular concern (the gentle hand on the arm, the use of the Christian name) and the presentation of a plausible alternative reality ('A summer girl goes swimming...'). Meadows's comment ('It's happened before.') provides Brody - the urban man with no experience of watery deaths ('What the hell do they usually do? Wash up or float, or what?') - with a convenient precedent. The chief of police finally begins to capitulate with the telling line: 'I'm just reacting to what I was told.' And, of course, the very next scene on the beach shows exactly that: Brody reacting rather than acting.

In the later scene in front of the billboard the balance of power has shifted. Brody and Hooper speak almost as one, their dialogue overlapping as they run off a litany of facts about shark attacks. The Mayor is on the defensive and walks away from the two men, clutching at straws ('You don't have the tooth?') and trying to deflect the assault with irrelevancies ('Sick vandalism.') and snide remarks ('Love to prove that, wouldn't you?'). As in the ferry scene, Brody employs a food reference ('If you open the beaches on the fourth of July, it's like ringing the dinner bell.') to predict the consequences of keeping the beaches open.

In both scenes Larry Vaughn wears the same jacket decorated with a distinctive anchor motif. This magnificent item of wardrobe not only says something about his vanity, but also serves as an ironic comment on his character: there is nothing stable about the shifting conscience of this small town politician.

Solitary Man

The shot of Brody watching the boy scout swimmers places him on the left side of the frame against a backdrop of grey utilitarian buildings and a chain link fence abutting onto a wall of concrete breeze blocks. This is no longer the picture postcard image of Amity but a more blue collar view of a working community. Brody, looking anxiously towards the sounds of the activity in the water, has his right hand behind his back and then reveals it to be holding a cigarette on which he takes a nervous puff. As the ferry -a flat-bed craft open both aft and stern - approaches, he gives the pilot directions, and there is another shot of the kids in the water, this time from a different angle that reveals them to be very close to the beach where a small crowd - possibly of parents - stands watching.

 

The image of Brody waiting nervously by the dock - a man incapable of taking action - has a visual echo in the town hall scene when the motel ownner bluntly asks him 'Are you going to close the beaches?' The reaction shot of Brody as he answers the question in a tone of lame apology places him alone in the frame in front of a large window that looks out onto another grey utilitarian building. Nigel Andrews in his analysis of this scene in his pocket movie guide draws an interesting comparison with a similar shot of James Stewart sitting silently before a corner's [sic] court in Vertigo. In that movie Stewart played a man whose fears forced him to be an observer of rather than a participant in the narrative and prevented him from acting when most needed. The link between the two characters of Martin Brody and Scottie Ferguson is, of course, visually implied by the celebrated track in/zoom out shots that signal the realization of their worst nightmares - for Brody witnessing the second shark attack from the beach, and for Scottie climbing the bell tower.

Red Alert

The ferry scene opens with a long shot of a stretch of water, a strip of beach in the background and beyond that green vegetation. Two marker buoys with red flags are positioned close together on the right of the screen with a third on the far left. On the right side of the frame a group of six swimmers can be seen splashing vigorously in pursuit of a man in a red tracksuit rowing a red boat. It's quite possible that this is the same red boat that will be capsized by the shark in the pond and if it is then the estuary victim was Amity's local scoutmaster.

 

Red has long been visual shorthand for danger. Hitchcock drenched the screen in it to convey hysteria in Marnie and even inserted a few crimson frames to the otherwise monochrome Spellbound for maximum dramatic effect. Brian de Palma's Blow Out, M.Night Shayamalan's The Sixth Sense and The Village, and Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind are a few of the titles that immediately come to mind when thinking of the use of red as a visual signifier.

Spielberg made a decision early on in pre-production to avoid the colour as much as possible so that when the ocean turned red in the shark attack scenes the impact would be all the greater. In transferring Jaws from the page to the screen the most significant adjustment in the colour scheme was to make the Orca's barrels bright yellow - in Benchley's original novel they are red. Yellow is the preferred colour for safety and rescue equipment at sea because of its high visibility, and for the same reason is commonly used as a background to warning signs. The movie exploits this safety/threat binary through its use of the colour and conditions the viewer to respond to it with a growing feeling of unease.

Loading Zone

Brody comes out onto the sidewalk in front of the hardware store just as Hendricks arrives in the police jeep. As soon as the chief spots the vehicle, he makes a 'pull over' gesture with the wooden stakes he's holding under his right arm and the deputy comes to a halt by the kerb just beyond a spot that is marked LOADING ZONE in pale yellow paint. Perhaps it was the presence of such prohibitions on the streets of the movie location (the junction of Walter Street and Main Street in Edgartown) that gave Carl Gottlieb the idea of working the motif into the script.

Hendricks brings news of one of the 'water activities' Brody has asked for ('a bunch of boy scouts out in April Bay doing their mile swim for their merit badges') and the chief immediately devolves responsibility for the sign making to the deputy - with the proviso that Polly does the printing. Hendricks's sulky response ('What's the matter with my printing?') is one of several moments in the movie that identifies his character as a man-child, well-meaning but naive. Brody gets into the jeep from the passenger side and sidles over on his rear to get behind the wheel.  It's an ungainly action, but it serves to save precious seconds of screen time and the need for a repositioning of the camera. Besides, if you look at movies from the Forties and Fifties, it seemed to be common enough practice. Detective Arbogast does it, for example, in Psycho when he returns to the Bates Motel  even though he is exiting the vehicle.

As Brody drives away, a voice off-screen calls 'Hey, chief' and there is a cut to a dapper looking man emerging from one of the buildings across the street. Mayor Larry Vaughn is the third and final member of Amity's political triumvirate to be introduced in this fashion. Coming down the steps behind him are the medical examiner and Meadows, who is in conversation with a Teamster-looking type next to be seen at the town hall meeting. Clearly, the powers-that-be have taken no time in getting into a huddle to discuss strategy. On the porch a young woman in a green shirt and yellow slacks is wrapping patriotic bunting of red, white and blue around one of the building's columns. Vaughn calls again after the departing police vehicle and this time his tone has an edge to it. The brief expression of thwarted authority that crosses the mayor's face as one of his public servants fails to heed his call tells us everything we need to know about this scheming politician.

In a reverse shot we see Hendricks crossing the street, laden down with the sign making equipment, and the mayor joins him at the centre of the intersection just as the local marching band swings past on a practice run. The deputy has to shout over the noise in order to make himself heard. It's both an aural and visual representation of the movie's dilemma: the two men are surrounded by organised jollity and as the band plays on no one takes any heed of the potential threat.

Summer Ginks

Brody enters the hardware store to find yet another disgruntled Amity resident in conversation with the storekeeper. The customer's complaint plays over the scene as Brody walks between the shelves of gardening implements and household tools in search of paints and brushes. On the surface it seems like just some background noise, but in fact it dovetails neatly with two of the movie's intertwining themes: the economic imperative and the basic impulse to survive.

The dissatisfied customer is clearly one of the many islanders who depends on the summer tourists for his livelihood, and, like many such people, he refers to his clients in mildly derogatory terms ('the summer ginks'). His supply chain has been disrupted ('You haven't got one thing on here I ordered. Not a beach umbrella, not a sun lounger, no beach balls.') and the prospect of a financially successful season is under threat ('This stuff ain't going to help me in August.'). The litany of beach accessories - completely innocent in itself - acts as a kind of grim counterpoint given the knowledge that both Brody and the audience possess in much the same way that a neighbour's innocent repetition of the word knife plays on the murderess's guilt in Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929).

The customer's last but incomplete line ('If  I can't get service from you, I'll go and get service from -') is later echoed in Larry Vaughn's observation of economic competition ('If the people can't swim here, they'll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island.'). The movie's pop critique of capitalism appealed to Fidel Castro, who praised the film for its Marxist sympathies in conversation with Francis Ford Coppola.

The brief scene in the hardware store ends with another instance of Brody's clumsiness, cutting to the next scene as a jar of paint brushes crashes onto the shelf.

Main Street

The next scene begins with an exterior shot of an empty street. White picket fencing marks the boundaries of properties on both sides of the road, and the houses that can be seen behind leafy trees are of white clapboard. A branch of pink blossom hangs over the upper left portion of the frame. Brody emerges from a building on the far side of the street, delivering a line of continuity dialogue as he opens the gate. As he begins to march purposefully down the street a cyclist in a blue shirt passes him in the opposite direction. The long shadow he casts in front of him is a reminder that it's still early morning. The camera executes a reverse track to the corner of the street and swivels to follow Brody as he passes a green fire hydrant. Just before the cut to a different angle, Brody breaks his stride with a little skip. As he walks, a sequence of sound effects (a dog barking, birds singing, and the distant sound of a high school band) help to suggest the idyllic nature of the community. The geometric precision of the white fencing and the gleaming white facades are in stark contrast to the twisted broken fencing on the beach. Here at least there is an appearance of harmony and orderliness - even the fire hydrant has been painted in the same colours as the shutters of the houses that line the street.

As Brody passes one of these houses a man in a charcoal suit emerges. Although we do not yet know that this is the medical examiner with whom Brody has just spoken, his sombre clothing - more in keeping with an undertaker than anything - sets him apart from the bright summer imagery that infuses the scene. In contrast, the next character to step out onto the street in Brody's wake is Harry Meadows, the editor of Amity's local newspaper. His powder blue linen suit is at least more in keeping with the season. Intent on his purpose, Brody notices neither of the two men, but their convenient appearance just as he walks by suggests the way in which the Amity grapevine works. As he marches down the slope towards the town's main intersection, Brody is accosted by another elderly resident, one of several seemingly interchangeable old codgers who harry the chief at different moments in the film. On this occasion the complaint is about the karate school kids, but Brody deflects it once again.

In contrast to the almost deserted streets through which Brody has just walked, the town centre is bustling with activity. Cyclists and pedestrians (including a woman in a yellow trouser suit) mill about under a large banner proclaiming the forthcoming Fourth of July celebrations. The sound of a whistle accompanies Brody as he crosses the street, like an echo of the one that summoned him to the grisly discovery on the beach.

Coroner's Report

 
Polly's account of the karate school kids is interrupted by the telephone. She picks up on the first ring and barely gives the medical examiner time to speak before she passes the call to Brody, who, cradling the receiver on his shoulder, acknowledges it with a terse interrogative 'yeah'. He then aligns the report in the typewriter and types the words SHARK ATTACK as the Probable Cause of Death. The scene is lifted directly from the novel, but dispenses with a conversation between the coroner and the police chief that implies a cordial relationship between the two men. In the film the medical examiner is virtually silent - speaking only when directed by the Mayor and voicing opinions that have been foisted on him. Behind his thick-framed Henry Kissinger glasses, the expression on his face shifts as easily as his conscience.

The brief close up of the report in the typewriter tells us that the victim of the attack was a student and that the time of death was estimated at 11.50 p.m. The date is given as 7-1-74, which will prove to be a continuity error in the movie's time line when the second shark victim is attacked on the twenty ninth of June. More immediately noticeable, however, is a spelling mistake: the word coroner has been typed out twice as corner. Unlike the typos in Jack Torrance's manuscript, this is unlikely to be a subtle indication of character, but simply poor spelling from the movie's props department. The report is in any case destined to be thrown away - or amended, as the medical examiner puts it - and the document Hooper consults in the mortuary scene gives 'probable boating accident' as the cause of death.

Polly tries to reassert her position by setting the morning's agenda, but Brody, rising from his desk, interrupts her with a request for 'a list of all the water activities that the city fathers are planning today.' The reference suggests a government of benign patronage and benevolent wisdom and, when the authorities gather to announce the temporary beach closure, it's no surprise that they are made up exclusively of men. In Jaws women are relegated to supporting roles - the caring mother in Ellen Brody, or the grieving one in Mrs Kintner.

As Brody leaves his office, the camera tracks back and then pans with him as he heads for the exit, executing a reverse of the shot that opened the scene. With the exception of the cutaway to show the police report, the whole scene has in fact been filmed in a single take. Brody asks Hendricks about the beach closed signs. The deputy's bewildered response ('We never had any.') prefigures Meadows's comment ('We never had that kind of trouble in these waters.') on the ferry.

Brody pulls on his windcheater and, dodging an elderly resident who has come to complain about illegal parking, makes for the exit. There is a curious detail of wardrobe that is never explained: over his right shoulder Brody is wearing what looks like an orange towel, just as he had in the earlier scenes at home. He pulls his jacket on over it, but this time there is no wife to pull it teasingly from him. It has, at any rate, disappeared by the time he emerges onto the street in the next scene. If there is any reason for this piece of wardrobe, it is never given, and one can only speculate that his character is such a bundle of neuroses that he requires the comfort of a security blanket.

Wax On Wax Off

Not yet having been brought up to speed on the shark attack, Polly's main concern is the nine year old kids who have been karateing the picket fences. She recounts Amity's latest crime wave in a folksy idiom ('...we got a bunch of calls...') and a comically bewildered tone that is accompanied by an equally comic mime of a karate chop. In contrast to the Amity of Peter Benchley's novel (which is riddled with real violence and corruption), the community in the movie is a cosy place where crime is limited to quirky high jinks of karate vandals or the low level misdemeanors of tourists parking in red zones.

By the mid Seventies the craze for martial arts - kick-started by the twin successes of Enter the Dragon (1973) on the big screen and the David Carradine show Kung Fu (1972 - 1975) on the small - was in full swing. James Bond had already jumped on the bandwagon with an Eastern-themed adventure in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), as had the dying Hammer horror studio in the same year with The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Sam Peckinpah would demonstrate the balletic quality of hand to hand combat in The Killer Elite (1975). The song Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas was a disco hit the year Jaws was being filmed. The popularity of chop-socky cinema at the time helps to put Amity's nine year old vandals in some kind of cultural context, but the association of karate and fences wouldn't be made explicit in American cinema again until the middle of the next decade.

Let Polly Do The Printing

The next scene - the only one to take place in the Amity police station - opens with a shot of a traumatised Cassidy sitting in the foreground on the left of the frame with Patrolman Hendricks in the background on the right. Each man has a glass of a pale milky liquid in his hand, a mixture no doubt concocted to settle their queasy stomachs. While Cassidy seems unaware of the glass in his hand, Hendricks sips at his like a boy who has been given a soda as a treat. There is the sound of a door opening and closing and Polly - a plump white-haired woman in grey tweed - steps into the room. She addresses Hendricks in a surprised tone, and her greeting ('Well, you're up awful early.') hints at Amity's low crime rate as well as the somewhat folksy nature of its police force. This latter point is reinforced by the woman's character itself, which is quickly established as that of a slightly scatty matriarch. Hendricks motions her towards the sound of typing that is coming from off-screen and Polly marches past a bulletin board on which is pinned an image of the stars and stripes and the legend This Is Our Flag Be Proud Of It.

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The camera pans with her and tracks behind her as she enters the chief's office. Brody is at his desk, typing. He ignores his secretary's question ('What have you got on today?') and gives her a gentle reminder about the new filing system, suggesting the minor power struggle that exists between them. The camera comes to a momentary halt as Brody and Polly have their initial exchange, and a third of the screen on the left is obscured by the wall and door jamb. As Polly comes around the desk, the camera moves over the threshold to reveal a composition of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines provided by shadows on the wall, the fixtures and furniture of the interior and the partial view of a pitched roof outside the window. Like the earlier images of the skewed vertical slats of the broken fencing along the beach, the geometry of the frame provides the viewer with a subliminal visual message. The message itself is a contradiction, one that suggests a sense of dislocated order, and it is a concept that will inform both the community's initial attempts to keep the monster at bay and the final improvised strategies employed by the three men who are chosen to hunt it down.

The brief but memorable role of Polly was given to a non-professional actress called Peggy Scott. Like the other locals cast in the movie, she was chosen because she looked and sounded the part. Her delivery gives the dialogue an almost improvisational feel, whilst both the pitch of her voice and her general demeanor look forward to the diminutive ghostbuster played by Zelda Rubinstein in Poltergeist.

You Know How To Whistle, Don't You?

As Brody and Cassidy run towards the sound of the whistle the camera cuts to a reverse angle further down the beach and shows a pair of blue-uniformed legs stagger on a sand dune. With a final shrill blast the owner of the legs collapses into a heap and in close up we see the face of Patrolman Hendricks. He occupies the right side of the screen - just as Brody did when he took the phone call in the kitchen. The crown of his hat is cropped just above the brim by the top of the frame. Over his left shoulder, on which can be seen a blue and yellow patch bearing the Amity Police emblem, is a quadrant of sea. Snaking away behind him to the left of the screen is a tilted section of weather-beaten fencing, and in the distance can be seen six orange and white striped bathing cabins. The expression on the officer's face is either fear or disgust, or both, and - to leave us in no doubt that he has just stumbled upon something unpleasant - a brief ominous music cue plays on the soundtrack. The whistle (attached to a key ring) is still clenched between his teeth and, as he removes it with an almost automatic gesture, he wipes his lower lip with the back of his hand, breaking a thin line of saliva that hints at a recent emetic reaction.

There is a cut to a lateral view of the surf line as Brody and Cassidy arrive at the scene and the camera pans with them as they come to a halt. They remain framed on the left side of the screen between two extended wooden poles that form part of the twisted fence whilst Hendricks kneels on the dune on the right. Brody motions to Cassidy to remain where he is and then advances cautiously towards something out of shot. In the foreground, his head bowed, Hendricks picks up his whistle-cum-key-ring and digs it into the sand like a petulant schoolboy. The sound of seagulls is prominent on the soundtrack almost drowning out the music which continues to play under the scene, now less ominous and almost plaintive.

Having wound the tension up to such a point, Spielberg satisfies our ghoulish curiosity with a close up: a lump of tangled seaweed overrun with scuttling crabs in which the recognisable form of a female hand entangled in hair is upraised as if in a final plea for help. This will, presumably, be the same limb that Hooper examines in the later mortuary scene. The crabs - like the spiders that Indiana Jones brushes off Alfred Molina's back in Raiders of the Lost Ark- seem to hunt in packs. They also seem to be able to fly as one of them drops into the frame (no doubt aided by a wrangler dressing the set) just as Brody utters the words, 'Oh, Jesus.' As the crabs swarm over the grisly flotsam the score incorporates eerie harp figures that seem an echo of the music that accompanied Chrissie's midnight swim.

There is a cut to a medium shot of Brody standing to the left of the frame, the sea beating implacably behind him. He is still clutching the girl's belongings that he has gathered up like a beachcomber - her jeans and top under his arm, his left hand clutching the orange hemp bag. He removes his glasses and turns his head towards the ocean until his eye line connects with the horizon. This visual motif - already established in the shot of Brody's silhouette in the bedroom - establishes him as an observer rather than a participant of the action. There will be two further occasions when he stares out at the expanse of water (before the attack on the Kintner boy and after the attack in the estuary) and only on the second and final occasion - as the camera follows his gaze and pushes out into the ocean - will he make the decision to act.

The beach scene in which Chrissie's remains are discovered  was the first scene of the movie to be filmed (in May 1974) and - judging from the mismatched weather patterns alone - it clearly took more than a single day. By a stroke of luck the changing sea and sky contribute a subliminal message. When Cassidy and Brody walk along the beach the sky is blue and the sun sparkles invitingly. In the next moment with the discovery of the body, the sky has become uniformly overcast and the water is a cold slate green. Although it was probably not remarked upon at the time, it was a sign of things to come.