Steven Spielberg Movies: Jaws (1975)

Spielberg role: Director/Musician (uncredited)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Genre: Thriller
Main Cast: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Release Year: 1975
Country: US
Run Time: 124 minutes

The film begins at a late night beach party on fictional Amity Island in New England from which a young woman (Susan Backlinie) leaves to go skinny dipping. She dives into the water, where she is suddenly jerked around and then pulled under by an unseen force. The next morning, Amity's new police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is notified that the woman is missing. Brody and his deputy Len Hendricks (Jeffrey Kramer) find her mutilated remains washed up on the shore. The medical examiner informs Brody that the victim's death was due to a shark attack. Brody heads out to close the beaches, but is intercepted and overruled by the town mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who fears that reports of a shark attack will ruin the summer tourist season—the town's major source of income. The medical examiner says he was wrong about a shark attack and tells Brody that it was a boating accident. Brody reluctantly goes along with this.

A short time later, a young boy named Alex is attacked and brutally killed by a shark while swimming off a crowded beach on an inflatable raft. His mother places a $3,000 bounty on the animal, sparking an amateur shark hunting frenzy and attracting the attention of local professional shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw). Quint interrupts a town meeting to offer his services; his demand for $10,000 is taken "under advisement". Brought in by Brody, ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) conducts an autopsy on the first victim's remains and concludes she was killed by a shark.

Soon after, a large tiger shark is caught by a group of novice fishermen, leading the town to believe the problem is solved, but an unconvinced Hooper asks to examine the contents of the shark's stomach. Because Vaughn refuses to make the "operation" public, Brody and Hooper return after dark and learn that the dead shark does not contain human remains, just fish and garbage. Scouting aboard Hooper's state-of-the-art boat, they come across the half-sunken wreckage of local fisherman Ben Gardner's boat. Hooper dons a wetsuit and while exploring the vessel underwater discovers a shark tooth as well as the remains of Ben Gardner, who has been dismembered and left to decay. Despite evidence of the shark's presence, Vaughn still refuses to close the beach.

By the Fourth of July the beaches are covered in tourists. While a prank triggers a false alarm and draws off the authorities' attention, the real shark enters an estuary, kills a man, and nearly takes the life of Brody's oldest son, Michael. Brody forces a stunned Vaughn to hire Quint. Brody and Hooper join the hunter on his fishing boat, the Orca, and the trio set out to kill the man-eater.

At sea, Brody is given the task of laying a chum line while Quint uses deep-sea fishing tackle to try to hook the shark. Quint hooks an unseen fish, but Hooper suggests that it isn't a shark, and the two grow increasingly agitated with one another. As Brody continues chumming, the enormous shark suddenly looms up behind the boat. After a horrified Brody announces its presence with the infamous line "You're gonna need a bigger boat.", Quint and Hooper watch the great white circle the Orca and estimate the new arrival weighs 3 tons (2.7 metric tonnes) and is 25 feet (7.5 meters) long. Quint harpoons the shark with a line attached to a flotation barrel, designed to prevent the shark from being able to submerge as well as to track it on the surface, but the shark pulls the barrel under and disappears.

Night falls without another sighting, so the men retire to the boat's cabin, where Quint tells of his experience with sharks as a survivor of the World War II sinking of the USS Indianapolis. The shark reappears, damages the boat's hull, and slips away before the men can harm it. In the morning, while the men make repairs to the engine, a barrel suddenly reappears at the stern. Quint destroys the radio to prevent Brody from calling the Coast Guard for help. The shark attacks again, and after a long, hard chase, Quint harpoons it to another barrel. The men tie the barrels to the stern; but the shark drags the boat backwards, forcing water onto the deck and into the engine, flooding it. Quint harpoons it again, attaching three barrels in all to the shark, while the animal continues to tow them. Quint is about to cut the ropes with his machete when the cleats are pulled off the stern. The shark continues to attack the boat and Quint powers towards shore with the shark in pursuit, hoping to draw the animal into shallow waters, where it will be beached and drowned. In his Ahab-like obsession to kill the shark, Quint overtaxes Orca's damaged engine, causing it to seize.

With the fishing boat immobilized, the trio try a desperate approach: Hooper dons his SCUBA gear and enters the ocean inside a shark proof cage, intending to stab the shark in the mouth with a hypodermic spear filled with strychnine. The shark instead destroys the cage, causing Hooper to lose the spear and flee to the seabed. As Quint and Brody raise the remnants of the cage, the shark throws itself onto the boat, crushing the transom. As the boat starts sinking, Quint slides down towards the shark, slashing at it in vain with his knife before being pulled under and devoured. Brody retreats to the boat's cabin, which is now partly submerged, and throws a pressurized air tank into the shark's mouth when it rams its way inside. Brody finds a rifle and climbs the mast of the rapidly sinking vessel. After temporarily driving the shark off with a fishing gaff, Brody begins shooting at the air tank still wedged in the shark's mouth. He says the line "Smile, you son of a..." and fires the rifle, exploding the tank and blasting the shark's head to pieces. As the shark's carcass drifts toward the seabed, Hooper reappears on the surface. They cobble together a raft out of debris from Orca and paddle back to Amity Island.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_(film)