Hooper tells Brody
over the walkie-talkie that there have been no sightings of the shark before a
cut to a shot looking down on the crowded beach. In the background a group of
sunbathing tourists watch as a man dressed in a blue blazer, white slacks and a
wide-collared open-neck shirt walks towards the camera and looks directly into
the lens. The microphone in his hand and the manner of his speech identify him
as a television news reporter, and he is played by Peter Benchley. Putting the
author of the original book in the movie was not simply a case of vanity
casting. His experience as a reporter for a syndicated TV news service meant
that he could deliver his lines with the right amount of faux earnestness. Even
his appearance – which Carl Gottleib described as a “blend of bookish Harvard
intellectual and tennis-playing, scuba-diving athlete” – is right for the part:
with his square jaw and thick-framed glasses, he could almost be mistaken for
Clark Kent.
He describes Amity in
idyllic terms (“clean air, clear water, beautiful white sand beaches”), a
verbal equivalent of the picture-postcard image presented by the town’s
billboard. As he hits his mark at the top of the dune, he adopts a tone of
gravitas in describing the threat to the island as “a cloud in the shape of a
killer shark”. It’s an apt description for a community that equates summer with
prosperity and one that would not be out of place alongside the prosaic
metaphors that the author employed in the source novel.
