The extended Fourth of July sequence, which takes the film to the mid-point of its running time, begins with the first of the movie’s two montages: intercut between shots of tourists arriving on the island is a scene in which Brody and Hooper work the phones in a frantic attempt to recruit shark spotters. At least, the general interpretation of the narrative assumes that the action takes place on the holiday. If we assume that what we are seeing in the montage is tourists arriving on the morning of 4th July then the grammar of film editing implies that the frantic phone calls interspersed between these shots is happening at the same time. Logic, however, dictates that Brody and Hooper - having been given carte blanche by Larry Vaughn to protect the community (“Now, if you fellows are concerned about the beaches, you do whatever you have to to make them safe.”) - would have manned the phones as soon as they’d finished arguing with the mayor, on the 3rd. Despite the desperate nature of Brody’s phone calls, (“We’ve got to have help, anyone with a gun or a boat.”), the chief manages to marshal a tightly-knit team to patrol the beaches: uniformed men equipped with walkie-talkies and shark repellent, armed with rifles, and prepped with code protocols (“Red one! Red one! Get the people out of the water!”). And yet, instead of the meetings and briefings that such logistics would require, we get only a few snatches of telephone conversations. Antonia Quirke sees this as ‘a light parody of the putting-on-a-show, last minute panic scene’, but this may be attributing a greater meaning to the scene than was intended. Ultimately, the Brody/Hooper phone conversations are simply movie shorthand, signalling to the audience the improvisational nature of the community’s response to the shark problem.
