Then there is Jaws the summer blockbuster that started it all and made the name of its director Steven Spielberg. It wasn’t blood and gore or even the scary, big-toothed shark – seen on screen only sparingly – that had people on the edge of their seats. It was the unbearable tension.

Jaws (1975) is a marvellously constructed and perfectly cast film, so much so that despite fans knowing when all the jump scares are coming (and what happens at the end) repeat viewings are always enjoyable. Bruce, the rubber shark, was elusive mainly because the mechanism that made him move was so temperamental. The revised and updated Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vinyard by Matt Taylor (Titan, £60) takes us behind the scenes during the making of the film on location in Massachusetts. It’s a mammoth tome promoted with a riff on the famous line from the film: ‘you’ll need to get a bigger coffee table’.

When Taylor was a boy, he had summers on Martha’s Vinyard and first saw Jaws aged seven. “When researching the book, I rarely encountered locals who didn’t have scrapbooks or photos they weren’t willing to contribute to the book,” he says adding, “I can’t imagine a more fascinating film production to have documented.”

Another film that’s celebrating its 50th birthday, with a devoted cult following (and shot not far from Martha’s Vinyard) is Grey Gardens a pioneering, fly-on-the-wall documentary by Albert and David Maysles. Inside the fly-blown summer house in exclusive East Hampton (a playground for rich New Yorkers) live Big Eadie (79) and her daughter Little Eadie Bouvier Beale (56), the forgotten aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy.

The story of the film (which became a staple of midnight - and student screenings) is told in a reissue of BFI Film Classics: Grey Gardens by Matthew Tinkom (Bloomsbury, £12.99). The Eadies had given up on their life of money amid the Manhattan elite of their youth and seemed to now glory in their eccentricity, pennilessness and fragile mental health.

By the 1970s the women were living in near squalor, the cat-filled house surrounded by an unkempt garden. The Maysles brothers took their 16mm camera into the house to reveal the mother propped up in a detritus-covered bed admiring herself in a hand-mirror. Little Eadie, a natural performer, was shown ceaselessly talking and prancing around in ratty homemade outfits years before the concept of ‘reality TV’.

What riveted audiences was the unapologetic nature of the Beales, whose fortunes had taken a hideous downturn and were now just clinging on, at turns bickering and bubbly. ‘It took nearly two years to edit 72 hours of raw footage into an hour and a half,’ writes Tinkcom. ‘The film derives its affective pull on the viewer by having a carefully orchestrated narrative that builds to an emotionally fraught conversation between mother and daughter about the latter’s sense of imprisonment and the blame she assigns to Big Eadie for her never having married.’

The film was not without its critics. Many saw it as horribly exploitative, the audience invited to laugh at the deluded Beale girls. But others looked deeper and saw it as addressing an almost existential view of the vicissitudes of life, the Beales were the ultimate survivors. The movie also had a morbidly camp aspect, two crazy women playing for the camera as racoons scuttled in the attic. Not for nothing did it have a lasting legacy: there was a follow-up, a TV movie (with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore) and even a stage musical.

It might have been a tragic tale of thwarted lives but the Beales courageously carry on against the odds. The stoic and philosophical Little Eadie says at one point: “There are some nice people in the world. I just don’t happen to be related to any of them.”

The Story of British Propoganda Films by Scott Anthony (Bloomsbury, £24.99) looks at how the country, through organisations like the GPO Film Unit and the Central Office of Information, promoted itself and its culture and addressed issues of international diplomacy. British propaganda importantly influenced ‘other democratic societies away from the ideological extremes that ravaged Europe in the early 20th century’, writes Anthony. There was also a strong strand of public information films aimed at homegrown audiences. Think of the brilliant, short film Night Mail (1936), a fantastic example of creative British filmmaking.

Bluesky: @kenwilson84.bsky.social