2. "You're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat" (Jaws, 1975)
Okay, so this one is a bit cheeky. What's precisely great about this clip is the absence of John Williams' music. As was the case with the first Star Wars film, Williams' score for Jaws saved a movie that was arguably doomed from its otherwise catastrophic shoot. The notorious mechanical shark would rarely work properly, and Spielberg and Williams were forced to utilize the relationship between visuals and sound in chilling ways as a result. Their approach was based on a simple premise: if the mechanical shark doesn't, let's replace it with the shark inside the audience's imagination, and evoke it with music and the shark's own underwater POV shots. It worked wonders: John Williams' deep two-note motif became synonym for the shark's presence. The audience associated the music with the shark's presence, and one which Spielberg mined to masterful effect. To complete a sort of musical syllogism, during the scenes where there is no music, there is no shark either (think of the scene with the pranksters swimming around with the phoney shark fin). After establishing this rule, the audience thought they had sort of tacit agreement with the filmmakers "if you haven't included the shark's theme in a scene, we have nothing to worry about, for there is no shark." Obviously, this was utterly wrong. In the famous "you're gonna need a bigger boat" scene, the great white comes out of the blue to terrorise Roy Scheider, and there is no music preceding the attack. Williams' and Spielberg's genius caught global audiences with their guards down, and it became their most successful film to date as a result.