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.
