Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) is a significant cultural landmark in the Hollywood cinema of the late twentieth-century. In addition to the unprecedented box-office gross, which made it the first film in history to top $100 million on its initial release, it established its relatively unknown 27-year-old director as a powerful creative force. Spielberg went on to achieve major financial and critical success in the "new Hollywood" with a string of memorable films that confirmed him as Hollywood's pre-eminent storyteller. This supreme gift was unveiled in Jaws, a fundamentally very simple tale that seamlessly combined elements from the action adventure, thriller, and horror genres. Exciting, engrossing, and scary, Jaws is also, in the final analysis, fun, as were the then fashionable "disaster" movies such as The Towering Inferno (1974), which it far outstripped in providing well-characterized protagonists in a setting designed to strike a chord with Americans of all ages.

One of...