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.
