HAS THERE EVER BEEN A MORE DISAPPOINTING MOMENT IN FILM...:

[W]hile I have no doubt that "Jaws" will make a bloody fortune for Universal and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, it is a coarse-grained and exploitive work which depends on excess for its impact. Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written.

The opening sequence, an underwater camera giving a swift shark's-eye view of the depths, over the ominous murmuring basses of John Williams' good score, is excellent, carrying the promise of suggestive power. Then an abrupt and jolting cut takes us to a beach beer party to establish the great shark's first victim. The tension rises again as we are allowed to imagine the evil lurking beneath the water's placid, moonlit surface.

Land and sea quarrel thereafter. Peter Benchley's story, which he adapted with Carl Gottlieb, has Roy Scheider as the sea-fearing resort town chief of police, trying in vain to close the beaches over opposition of the merchants led by Murray Hamilton. A reward offered for the shark evokes a comical flotilla of amateurs.

Most of this, despite an intense performance by Scheider, is flat-bush melodrama, broad and obvious. Richard Dreyfuss arrives as the rich boy who, after a childhood experience, has become a shark expert. Robert Shaw is the local shark hunter, more than half-mad, a poor man's Captain Ahab who, having survived the shark infested seas after wartime torpedoing, is out to exterminate the species.

If the whole project from manuscript forward has been a commercially calculated confection, the tipoff in the movie is the stubborn refusal of the key characters to come in to sharp focus.

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