Jaws

Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1975, 124 mins. 35mm. Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss. The summer movie that started it all, this improbable, against-all-odds blockbuster about a Maine vacation spot terrorized by a great white shark showed that Steven Spielberg was a force to be reckoned with. Not only did he compose a technical masterpiece of Hitchcockian suspense by ingeniously working around an unwieldy rubber shark, he created an exhilarating film of existential horror that kept millions away from the beach.