15 Totally Flawless Movie Monologues
6. The Sharks Took The Rest - Jaws (1975)
What makes Jaws so scary isn't the shark, but the threat of it. It's barely in the movie, really, and when it is it's presence is fleeting. The rest of the film is about three men on a boat, bonding, clashing and waiting for the shark to rear its head.
In the middle of the film - before things go very, very wrong - marine biologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and veteran shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) get drunk and start exchanging stories about the scars they've amassed in their lives.
It's all good fun at first, until Quint tells Hooper and police chief Brody (Roy Schneider) that he's a survivor of the USS Indianapolis, the real-life war vessel that was sunk in the Pacific after delivering the Hiroshima bomb to an Air Force base.
Quint tells his companions about the sinking, and about the men he saw picked off one-by-one by sharks lurking in the water.
He's composed but haunted throughout, and his story - which certainly scares the life out of his crewmates - works wonders to ramp up the threat level of the vicious great white they're tracking. That it's based on a true story just makes it all the more unsettling...