The young Steven Spielberg had terrorised audiences with his truck-with-a-mind-of-its-own debut Duel (1971) and bigger budget Jaws confirmed him as a filmmaker of tension-ratcheting abilities not seen since the heyday of Alfred Hitchcock.
Based on a pulpy bestseller by Peter Benchley, this is a masterfully constructed thriller about three disparate men – a cop (Roy Scheider), a scientist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a sea dog (Robert Shaw) – setting out in a boat to capture a shark that’s terrorising swimmers off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
From the classic opening, in which two amorous teenagers leave a beach party to take a perilous dip, through numerous brilliantly set up, precisely edited subsequent attack sequences, Spielberg’s chilling adventure is the rollercoaster movie par excellence.
