Carib Gold

This "Black-cast" feature is quite obscure, recently resurrected on YouTube for curiosity seekers. It was released by Sam Lake originally, a man famous for distributing softcore porn in the '60s including Francis Coppola's first movie, believe it or not.

Ethel Waters stars and gives a solid performance as a bar owner/singer, but the main story about shrimp fishermen who discover sunken gold bullion is lousy, turning into sentimental melodrama. Unlike Lake's other movies, it lacks a commercial hook to overcome the boring nature of the sub-B movie content -hardly the kind of high adventure (such as pirate movies) that 1950's audiences might enjoy. And director Harold Young is untalented, nearing the end of his career, with the underwater footage shot at Miami's Seaquarium (misspelled sloppily in the credits) looking utterly fake -as if it were shot in a tank, not the ocean (true enough).

There's fun spotting such future heavyweight talent including Cicely Tyson, Diana Sands and Geoffrey Holder on screen, working during a lengthy period when they were denied as Afro-American performers casting in significant movie roles. But that's hardly enough to justify sitting through such a boring hour of movie footage.

A shrimping boat off the Florida Keys keeps having its nets destroyed. Owner William Hill is ready to sell his boats, but is persuaded to send it out once more, with a diver to check it out... and discovers a sunken Spanish treasure ship with gold. A crew goes out to salvage it, but one turns out to be greedy and deadly.

It's a great idea for the story, even if the dialogue is pretty bad, and only top-billed Ethel Waters can sell it. She sings the title song, there's some decent water photography, and it's the movie premieres of Cicely Tyson and Geoffrey Holder. That makes it worth seeing.

The presence of Ethel Waters, first billed in Carib Gold, and singing its title song is enough reason to check this film out. Waters plays the mother of deep sea diver Coley Wallace best known for portraying Joe Louis in the Joe Louis Story.

Wallace works on a shrimp boat and while diving discovers some long sunken Spanish treasure ship at the bottom of the ocean. Wallace and others agree to get the stuff and fence it surreptitiously. But one of the crew gets greedy, steals some of it and commits murder in the process.

Some very familiar names and faces make their cinematic debuts like Diana Sands, Richard Ward, and Cicely Tyson. Geoffrey Holder plays a Carribean voodoo dancer.

The production values are nil in this film which looks like it was shot with chump change. But the acting all things considered is pretty good.

It's worth a look.