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.