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Convinced that the remains of a girl found on the shore indicate a shark attack, Martin Brody - chief of police in the Long Island resort of Amity - decides to close the beaches. Pressured by prominent citizens including Mayor Vaughn, who argue that the victim might have been mangled by a boat and point out the disastrous consequences of a shark scare on the tourist trade (the Fourth of July influx is imminent), Brody reluctantly agrees to post guards and warning signs instead. The shark kills a small boy, and with the beaches now closed, local sportsmen set out on a shark hunt. They return triumphant, but Brody is assured by Hooper, an oceanographic expert, that the dead shark is not the Great White that perpetrated the attacks. The distraught town council agrees to pay the $10,000 demanded by Quint, an experienced shark-killer, to do the job for them. Despite Brody's pathological fear of the sea - increased when he and Hooper find the deserted wreck of a fishing-boat attacked by the shark - he forces himself on the sneering Quint as an assistant along with Hooper. After a prolonged chase in which the shark seems to have become the hunter, Hooper is lost when he goes over the side in a diving cage to try a tranquillising dart; and Quint, rejecting any advice in his obsessive vendetta (he was one of the few survivors when his ship was torpedoed in shark-infested waters after delivering the Hiroshima bomb), is killed when the shark succeeds in demolishing the boat. Clinging despairingly to the wreckage, Brody contrives to blow the shark to bits with a compressed oxygen tank from Hooper's diving equipment. Hooper reappears unharmed, and Brody exultantly discovers that he has lost his fear of the sea.

Though it hardly merits its meteoric rise to the status of No. 1 box-office attraction of all time, Jaws is a perfectly acceptable, and sometimes genuinely exciting, entry in the disaster stakes. The Ibsenish first act, in which the police chief finds himself an enemy of the people because his action threatens prosperity and his inaction threatens security, would have been much more effective had a brilliant opening sequence (a solitary moonlit bathe by the first victim) not made the shark's presence so unequivocally evident that the dignitaries who try to argue otherwise are merely uninteresting straw dummies. Nevertheless the plot is much improved by ruthless trimming of the original's more novelettish aspects (the mayor's involvement with the Mafia; the police chief's rampant class inferiority as he tries to come to terms with a snob resort; the tiresome love affair between the oceanographer and the police chief's wife), and the resulting streamlining of these moments of foreboding inactivity allows Spielberg to make some effective gestures towards setting the teeth on edge (quite literally as Quint, making his first appearance at a turbulent council meeting, imposes silence by suddenly scraping his fingernails down a blackboard). The sense of edgy unease is beautifully transmitted in a series of tiny, throwaway moments like the one on the crowded beach where Brody is politely listening to an importuning citizen but really trying to see past his obstructing body for any signs of alarm at the water's edge (and one suddenly realises that one hasn't heard a word the speaker is saying either); or when, just as a lookout gives the all-clear for swimmers, one seems to catch a momentary glimpse of a dark shadow he has missed. Once the trio of shark-hunters put to sea in their boat (where they remain for the rest of the film), Jaws finds itself on firmer ground with a brisk narrative that neatly blends documentary (the fascinating details of equipment, skills and mystique required for a shark-killer) and fiction (the exciting duel with a monster whose size and cunning gradually inflate in the mind) with a just measure of unpretentious psychological insight (initially hostile, the trio are gradually drawn together, but only by the euphoria of their communal effort). Here, with the battleground boldly staked out by the marker buoys trailing behind the harpooned shark, but suddenly and alarmingly abandoned as strategically placed shots suggest a guerrilla warfare in which the shark steals up to reconnoitre the enemy or retreats to contemplate attack on the placidly vulnerable boat isolated in the middle of nowhere, Spielberg almost manages to invest the shark - like the nightmarish petrol-tanker in Duel - with the quality of a Jungian archetype. His good work, unfortunately, is partially undone by a script straining to become Herman Melville and ending the portentous profundities attached to Robert Shaw's Quint (more Old Man of the Sea than Captain Ahab) by projecting him, not unexpectedly, into the jaws of his own unconvincing, mechanical Moby Dick.

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