He didn’t want to be reminded of the 6 days of horror every time he looked at his arm?
I (perhaps unwisely) took my young son to watch Jaws on the big screen on the 40th anniversary. As a young boy, he didn’t much care for slow scenes, he wants action. I looked over at him half way through the monologue, and he’s literally on the edge of his seat, fixated on every word. After the monologue ends, he slowly leans over and whispers “Was that real?”
Truly great scene.
I remember exactly the first time I saw that movie. The summer of 1975, and a buddy and I decided to catch the film while our girlfriends were of doing something else (Og knows what?). The cheapest showing was at the Baseline Drive-In in San Bernardino. We filled the ice chest, grabbed some snacks and settled in to watch what we thought was going to be your basic B-movie about a shark.
The most vivid memory I have is the sound of two beers simultaneously hitting the floor of the truck 5 seconds before the Chief says “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” 
Exactly. Or more mundanely, an ex-girl friend; which is why Hooper’s “Mother” line is really funny. As is Brody’s consideration of his appendectomy scar.
Terrific scene. (Although I’ve wondered if anyone pronounces “demise” that way in real life?)
Well, Lee and Adams are talking - Affleck is too busy being mortified.
There’s a “compare the scar” scene with Rene Russo and Mel Gibson in one of the Lethal Weapon movies, which is more amusingly rendered in parody form in Loaded Weapon 1 with Kathy Ireland and Emilio Estevez, starting here.
Jaws is one of the few movies, based on a book, in which I consider the movie to be the better!
The storyline and characters in the book are quite different than the movie. Brody’s wife and Hooper have an affair even, the book is a standard potboiler. Also, only Brody survives the shark hunt.
But the movie is one of my top twenty favorites, and I consider it to be one of the best monster/horror films ever made. And Spielberg was only twenty six when he directed it!
Charlton Heston mentioned Spielberg twice in his autobiograpy In the Arena. He remembers making a movie in northern California in 1966(The Warlord) and there was a sixteen year old kid that kept getting thrown out of the open outdoor sets. Finally they let him stay, he was so enthusiastic, and not causing trouble. It was Steven Spielberg.
Heston also mentioned Spielberg in the same breath as Cecil B. DeMille. Heston never worked with the former, but he certainly did with the latter, and said the thing those two had in common was “they had their finger on the pulse of what Americans would want to see in a movie.”
I first saw it three weeks after it opened, at a midnight showing, and thought I knew all the spoilers. I remember screaming and so did the rest of the theater, with everyone making “pushback” motions with their hands.
I’m amazed that nobody has mentioned the music in that scene.
And, of course, he got the date wrong by a month.
And he says they were found at noon on the fifth day; they were actually found just before mid-day on the fourth day in the water. He got the details right that the first plane to find them was a Lockheed Ventura, followed by a PBY.
I just watched the entire dinner scene until the whale song starts. I can’t see any difference in Shaw’s shirt at any time. It’s unbuttoned to the waist, but still tucked in. It opens and closes as he moves around during the scene, but I never see an instance where it’s clearly buttoned again. In the closeups during his speech, it doesn’t look wide open, but that could just be because of how he’s moving.
Dreyfuss’s shirt shows some differences during the monologue though. The top 2 buttons are always unbuttoned, but as they cut from Shaw & Dreyfuss to Scheider & back again, the position of the flaps over the opening changes. Since he was sitting stock still during the speech, I’m willing to believe those are from different takes. Specifically, sometime it looks pulled open like you’d expect since he had just shown off his broken heart, sometimes the flaps are nearly closed.
Something else that I’ve never noticed before - Right after they drink to their legs, the scene cuts to Scheider looking at his scar wondering whether to talk about it, then back to Shaw and Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss starts unbuttoning his shirt to show off his broken heart, but at the same time, Shaw is rebuttoning and zipping up his pants, and his belt is open. His belt was clearly buckled just a few seconds earlier while he was showing off his leg, so there must have been another injury that required Shaw to drop his pants that got cut.
The movie is on Netflix BTW.
And finally, my favorite deleted scene of all time, Quint buying piano wire.
In the book…doesn’t Quint die because “He’ll never wear a life jacket again”?
Yep, great scene.
Another of my all-time favorite Spielberg moments is another one where a powerful, chilling story is conveyed almost entirely verbally: from early on in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I have never watched this film in its entirety. I’ve seen the famous opening scene many times, as well as other oft shown clips but not the one the OP references. Until reading this thread I really had no interest in watching it. Despite it being a classic, the premise is not interesting to me and I’m more likely to root for the shark (or at least I’ll feel bad when they finally blow it up or whatever). But after reading all the comments I must say I’m intrigued. I’m now thinking of a movie about the Indianapolis that I saw several years ago but unfortunately the name escapes me. Definitely not the one with Nicolas Cage; this one was good.
And then there’s the story of how the Captain was court-martialed for not zig-zagging, and killed himself.
But nevermind the FUBAR of how their ship wasn’t listed missing for so long. And had no escort.
One of science fiction author Jack Chalker’s few pieces of non-SF and non-fantasy fiction is the 1981 novel The Devil’s Voyage, about the fate of the Indianapolis. It’s fiction, with a lot of speculations, but interesting. Very unlike his other stuff:
Why did Brody say “you” instead of “we”?
There was a made-for-TV movie with Stacy Keach: “Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the USS Indianapolis”.
As far as Brody was concerned, he was just along for the ride. Killing the shark was Quint’s job, not his.
I really recommend you watch it. The shark isn’t really what the movie is about at all.
Oh Jeebus, now I know this thing exists. But Cage will enhance the believability of the plot. If her were the captain of a thousand man ship, I would expect 800 of them to have jumped overboard even during a peacetime cruise.