Seeing the classic horror (more on this later!) film Jaws as an older man, I discovered a new truth...that sometimes in real life you encounter stuff that might be scarier than a soulless behemoth come from the depths to make soup and salad of you! I found it in the very quietly awesome and pivotal scene in which Quint(Robert Shaw) and Hooper(Richard Dreyfuss) compare the scars of their lives on and in and off the water while a bemused Chief Brody(Roy Scheider) looks on. Then Hooper points out a scar on Quint which Quint says had once been a tattoo identifying him as a survivor of the USS Indianapolis from World War II. Coming back from it's secret mission to deliver the H Bomb that would be dropped on Japan, the Indianapolis would be torpedoed with over eight hundred men left in the water. Eventually the men were rescued, but only 312 would survive. Several of the deaths were attributed to shark attacks.
There are indeed man-eating sharks of many kinds which this scene pays a solemn tribute to ...not just the organic ones...for the secretive mission of the USS Indy contributed to the great length of time it took to rescue the sailors not to mention the failure of the US Navy at different stages of the rescue. Another shark threatening the good folk of Amity are the town select men who resist Brody's attempts to close the beaches to the tourist trade which is Amity's lifeblood. Economic pressures brought to bear on the little town force this decision which results in the deaths of at least three people within the film. A wonderful, but chilling
scene has the grieving mother of a shark slain child strike Brody on the face for allowing the beaches to remain open when they knew a shark was threatening.How strong is the good in human beings when faced with difficult, dangerous choices...when you seem doomed no matter what you decide. Brody and the rest of the Amity folks are faced with impossible choices with consequences fated to destroy their idyllic lives. Peter Benchley's multi-faceted novel has more about this and I suggest that viewers check it out, but Steven Spielberg does a visual interpretation worthy of Benchley's vision of dread and doom. Which is about as much as anyone can claim of a film which at it's heart, is most assuredly a horror film. Aside from the usual suspects...lots of gore, horrendous monster, and lots of Hitchcockian foreboding...Jaws is also a magnificent and horrifying look at how sometimes sharks actually walk arou
nd on two legs in the inhumanity practiced against humanity.TH Reviews rating of Jaws: 5 out of 5 glorious stars....Highly Recommended!!!
