You should view Jaws as 2 movies. The first half is your summer blockbuster. But its also a built up to slowly make you familiar with the three leading characters (in both meanings). And then, the second half, Jaws begins to shine. The shark, except for a few scenes, completely moves into the background as some abstract force of nature. But the real center are the three people on this small boat, which is everything which keeps them away from certain death. And this concludes into a stage where civilization doenst that much anymore. And it also shows that cutting away civilization doesnt always means that humans become worse. Quint spent most of his life in such scenarios and therefor handles that situation very well (beside that he destroyed their only tool of rescue ;) ). Hooper on the other side wasnt able to handle that scenario as good, but also started to realize almost at the end of the movie that they had to fight together to survive. Brody, finally, was simply at a state of shock. So this is something completely different then a shark eating tourists from the beach drive-in ;) .
And Chinatown got even two likeable characters (to bad one of them died). And Psycho indeed is something completely different then Jaws. Jaws (nor Godfather ;) ) doesnt even come near the complexity and awesomeness of Psycho. And Scarface is the child of a complete different era then Godfather. But de Palma knew whats important with movies. You have to built up an emotional bond with someone (even a mob boss). Otherwise the movie is simply a tech demo :) . And Hitchcock knew that better then anyone. He was even able to built up support for an mass murderer. And that bond was so tight, that the movie viewers even was as shocked as Norman when the car stopped sinking into the swamp for a brief moment. We supported a mass murderer at one of his crimes. Thats how important it is to built up such a bond. Otherwise .... Norman kills another person .... boring :) .
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