Aw Shucks

If Jeffrey C. Kramer - credited below Carl Gottleib and above Susan Backlinie - signed on for the part of Patrolman Lenny Hendricks on the basis of the novel alone, he must have been disappointed. In the book the character is a veteran of Vietnam, a competent officer with a command of radio call signs, a working knowledge of boats, and with an ambition to one day be chief of police himself. The movie reduces him to a likable but bumbling sidekick, more boy than man, more well-meaning than effective. In fact, the Hendricks of the movie seems to be based more on the character of Patrolman Maxwell Slide from The Sugarland Express than the police officer created by Peter Benchley.

Kramer appears in a number of scenes to provide background continuity and to underline the fact that - like the town of Haddonfield in John Carpenter's Halloween - the local police force is run by a skeleton crew. He's one of the passengers in the car that sneaks up on Brody on the local ferry; he's in the crowd at the town hall meeting and later helps stake out the No Swimming signs on the beach; he's on the dock, unlit cigarette in his mouth, when the shark bounty hunters descend on the town; he supervises the cleaning of the defaced billboard while Brody, Hooper and Vaughn bicker over the missing shark's tooth; and he's on one of the patrol boats in the Fourth of July beach scene. On the rare occasions he gets to deliver dialogue, it is usually to display childish querulousness ("What's wrong with my printing?") or inappropriate boyish enthusiasm ("We had a shark attack at South Beach this morning, mayor!").

Kramer had his part beefed up for Jaws 2 and displayed a knowledge of seafaring that gave him the edge over Roy Scheider's Brody, who was still all at sea when it came to boats. He remained a supporting actor (mostly in television) throughout the Eighties, and turned to producing in the following decade, most notably on the hip legal comedy-drama series Ally McBeal.