Open For Business

An orange and white shark swims out of an ink black sea and dies bloodily in a hail of laser-like bullets. A cut reveals the image to be on the screen of a video arcade game called Killer Shark being played by a young man on the beach front. Just like the shark souvenirs on sale at the dock, here is more evidence of Amity’s entrepreneurial spirit and its ability to turn adversity into an opportunity. The camera tracks left to right following Brody (in sandy coloured uniform) and Meadows (in unflattering claret coloured jeans) as they cross a beach populated predominantly by Waspish families and couples. Behind them we can glimpse a yellow stall decked with more of the shark jaw souvenirs. By the bandstand is a yellow oil drum, which may be either a coincidental piece of set-dressing or a deliberate visual foreshadowing of the Orca's barrels.

The sequence that follows takes Chapter Ten of the novel as its template. Although there are key points of reference common to both page and screen (Brody and Hooper on walkie-talkies, an interview for a TV station, a young boy who survives a close encounter with the shark), the movie aims for dramatic spectacle and scales the action up accordingly. Where Benchley made the setting a sparsely populated private beach on an ordinary Saturday, the filmmakers bring in hundreds of extras, a flotilla of boats and a helicopter, and locate the action on America’s most iconic of holidays.

Made at the height of the disaster movie boom by the studio that created the genre’s touchstones, Jaws was inevitably cast in the mould of another tale of group jeopardy, and so the film demanded a central set piece of mass panic. Audiences had paid good money to see people perish in a capsized ocean liner (The Poseidon Adventure), burnt to a crisp in a glass skyscraper (The Towering Inferno), and crushed by falling buildings (Earthquake). There was no reason to doubt that they wouldn’t do the same to see people being devoured by a man-eating shark. But, in fact, what ultimately made Jaws such a hit was not its pretensions to big-scale action, but its more intimate interaction between the principal characters. The beating heart of the movie is the tale of three men in a boat.

Tourists On The Menu

The opening shot of the montage is of a ferry coming in to dock, its upper deck crowded with tourists. A triangular yellow sign, framed in the centre of the screen, offers a subliminal colour-coded warning to the holidaymakers. There is a cut to an enlarged monochrome picture of the dead shark taken for The Amity Gazette on display on the sea front. Its prominence is a clever piece of PR, no doubt intended as a public service message to give the lie to the scaremongering graffiti on the billboard from the previous scene. Tourists walk past the image and the camera pans with them from right to left, tilting up to reveal the docked ferry. On the right of the frame a stall, decked out with flags and red, white and blue bunting, is selling shark souvenirs, a confirmation that Amity is, indeed, ‘open for business’.There is a cut to a medium close shot of Brody pacing his den while on the phone. The camera follows him as he moves right to left and then latches onto Hooper - also in mid-phone conversation – as he comes into frame from the opposite side. As Brody’s voice continues on the soundtrack, there is a cut to a shot from inside the ferry as its doors open and passengers begin to disembark, their figures black silhouettes against the bright primary colours of Amity's waterfront. It’s as if we are seeing the potential victims from inside the belly of the beast, a figurative POV shot of the shark’s great maw. 

As the tourists come off the boat - some on foot, some wheeling bicycles, some in cars - there is a cut back to Brody and Hooper in the den, now joined by the chief’s wife and younger son, one helping and the other hindering their work. With the exception of the early scene when Brody types out the coroner’s report in the police station, the movie locates key moments (Brody getting the phone call about the first victim, Brody researching sharks, Hooper describing the territoriality theory over dinner, the two men recruiting shark spotters) in the home. The threat to the family unit that the domestic setting implies is finally made explicit when Michael Brody narrowly escapes becoming the shark’s sixth victim in the estuary.

The montage of tourists continues with a sequence of shots: two yellow tour buses at a busy intersection manned by a white-gloved traffic cop, an elderly couple, another cop (no doubt one of the extra summer deputies) directing traffic with blasts of a whistle, a low-angle shot of tourists milling about, a woman in a nun’s habit, a close-up of a sign that reads Sight Seeing. Tours. Bikes. Car Rentals, a shot of another ferry docking, a middle-aged black woman in a red floppy hat, more cars, and more tourists with their heads cut off by the top of the frame. All this is orchestrated to a John Williams music cue, which has a celebratory baroque tone that adds a sense of pageantry to the arrival of the off-islanders. On the soundtrack album, the cue is given the classically-sounding title of ‘Promenade’, and – in parentheses – the more playful one of ‘Tourists on the Menu.’ The assembly of shots does not, however, aim for satire: there are no signs of the chubby holidaymakers munching on hot dogs that would appear in a similar montage sequence in the movie’s sequel. Although not quite cinema verite, the scenes here are clearly candid shots of real tourists arriving on Martha’s Vineyard, and even the individuals picked out by the camera (the nun, or the lady in the red hat) look like ordinary people, not Hollywood extras. 

There is a final cut back to the Brody house, where Matt Hooper is on the phone to an operator trying to get a connection whilst Martin and Ellen are deep in conversation in the background. Outside the windows the sea dominates the view, providing a visual foreshadowing of the watery horizons seen from the cabin of the Orca. The snatches of dialogue we hear from Brody in the interpolated phone scenes serve to highlight both his desperation (‘We’ve gotta have help - anybody with a gun or a boat.’) and determination (‘Okay, now I want to know how many men you’re gonna send me.’) Hooper’s first line echoes the exasperation he felt at the mayor’s stonewalling (‘Doctor, doctor, there is no need for me to come to Brisbane when I have a Great White shark right here!’) as well as referencing the minor plot point of his upcoming research trip. He is also given a complete non-sequitor (‘Mishkin? Mishkin is the guy that feeds the white mice.’), which one can only suppose is all that remains of a longer piece of freewheeling improvisation by Dreyfuss.

The montage comes to a close with a further sequence of shots: tourists carrying beach umbrellas and picnic baskets in a stiff breeze, a bicycle rental shop with a red bicycle hung outside as a sign, the intersection with the yellow tour bus still waiting to turn the street, and a final shot of another ferry arriving from Woods Hole as the music on the soundtrack swells to a dramatic conclusion.