‘Even masterworks have their blemishes,’ writes Nigel Andrews in his bite-sized Bloomsbury guide to Jaws. On the back of this proposition he goes on to argue that the Fourth of July scene is a failure, criticising it for being ‘scattered tonally between satire […] and suspense’. I don’t share this view; or rather, I don’t see this tonal shift as a criticism – in fact, one of the strengths of the movie is the way it navigates so expertly between humour and horror. I do agree, however, that a masterpiece can be flawed. There is one shot in Jaws lasting only a few seconds that always makes me wince - like the Amity folk reacting to the sound of Quint’s fingernails on the blackboard. Larry Vaughn has made his final pronouncement (‘[…] tomorrow is the Fourth of July and we will be open for business.’) and is about to depart. As if to emphasise the finality of the decision, a road sign with an arrow stamped with the legend ONE WAY - hidden up to this point by the figure of Vaughn standing by his car - is revealed when the mayor climbs in behind the wheel. As Vaughn drives out of shot Brody turns and looks off-screen to the left, and then we cut to that fingernail-grating insert. Matt Hooper is seated in profile on a pale rock on the left of the frame. Behind him and to the right is a line of curious sightseers gawping at the billboard, which is out of shot. Hooper turns his head to acknowledge Brody’s gaze and seems to look directly into the camera. There’s something staged and clunky about the moment. It’s partly to do with the way Dreyfuss turns his head, a gesture that seems like a response to a director’s cue rather than a natural piece of acting, and partly due to the fact that Spielberg (or editor Fields) holds the reaction shot for a beat too long. The fact that John Williams’s neo-baroque montage music cue announces itself with this exchange of glances only exacerbates the moment of artifice.
