With a shark for a villain, Peter Benchley could hardly have missed making Jaws a best seller, nor is director Steven Spielberg likely to miss with his film adaptation. Benchley and Spielberg's only problem was that a shark is almost too good a villain. What way could they find to oppose such unadulterated power? Put up against the Muhammad Ali of sharkdom, the whole human race looks like a Joe Bugner.

The trouble is that where a shark is simple by nature, man is various. Where a shark is unmistakable and purposeful, man is ambiguous and self-contradictory. Accordingly, both the novel and the film try to cover the board by putting three very different men up against the shark, leaving us to amuse ourselves guessing which one really has what it takes to kill the best. This puts the movie, as an entertainment, roughly on a par with...