"You're going to need a bigger boat."
American thriller/
horror movie from 1975, directed by
Steven Spielberg and written by
Peter Benchley and
Carl Gottlieb, based on Benchley's
novel. It starred
Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody,
Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper,
Robert Shaw as Quint,
Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody,
Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn, and
Bruce as the
shark. The
famous and very, very
menacing musical
score was composed by
John Williams.
The
plot is
familiar to most: a
Great White Shark moves into the waters outside
Amity Island and starts
munching on a number of
swimmers. The mayor wants the
crisis hushed up so the summer's
tourist trade isn't threatened, but as the
shark attacks increase, the
police chief, a
marine biologist, and
grizzled sea captain set out to try to end the shark's
rampage.
By now, you probably know that this was the first
Summer Blockbuster, that the
mechanical shark rarely worked right and was
replaced by
spooky first-person cinematography and
ominous music, that Shaw wrote his own
monologue about the sinking of the
USS Indianapolis. You probably know that Benchley objected to some elements of the
script (particularly the ending), that Spielberg delivered the
movie late and over
budget, and that it
still made the studio a ton of
money. I like to fool myself that the
character interaction is my
favorite thing in the movie (Show me a better or more
rousing rendition of "
Show Me the Way to Go Home" and I'll punch you in the teeth, you sneaky little bastard), but I can't deny that the scene with Scheider pitching
chum into the water gives me
chills every time I watch it. I have no idea whether
Alfred Hitchcock ever watched this movie, but if he did, I reckon he liked it. It's one of the most
suspenseful movies in decades. If you haven't watched it yet, you're denying yourself one of the great
pleasures of
cinema.
Some research from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)