O Alforge do Diabo

...about 10 minutes before the end of this fun movie, the lead actors are struggling underwater, when all of a sudden Richard Egan (..or his stunt double) reaches across the front of Jane Russell (..or HER stunt double) to free her from some impeding disaster, and as he pulls away his hand he pulls down her bathing suit ever so briefly and exposes the right nipple...

THIS is what HDTV wide screen technology can do..stuff that got by the editors years ago is now there for detailed and easy to see review.....DVDs make it even easier, but you have to catch UNDERWATER on cable..(..of course you can Tivo it and freeze frame whatever...)

Screened recently in national television in Australia, and on a Saturday afternoon so all 19 million of us could goggle at it in the daytime, the press release for the TV week magazine exclaimed: No Sunken treasure for Gilbert Roland, but oh boy, check Jane's sea Chest!.....now how could anyone miss that. Not ever seen in 3D here we have had to make do with that. Snazzy cossies and bubbling romance, this sensational lung stretcher cost as much as A STAR IS BORN but hasn't endured like Judy did. Jane is as gorgeous as ever and the film is fish tank pretty. Watch it and love it. No wonder poor RKO went bust too.

I purchased the recent Blu Ray release version of this film and I was pleasantly surprised by the exceptional picture quality of both the colorization and sound of Underwater! Heck, who doesn't like an adventure film about buried treasure on a sunken ship with sharks swimming around nearby of both the mammal and human persuasion. I really enjoyed this 1955 film for many reasons. First the story of a ship that got caught in a storm a century ago with gold bullion on board is sunk and lost forever, or so everyone thought.

Then two adventurous men (Richard Egan and Gilbert Roland) , their two attractive women (Jane Russel and Lori Nelson) and a priest (Robert Keith) sign up for the adventure of their lifetime to find and recover this buried treasure. The priest's mission is not for the greed of gold but because there are some religious solid gold artifacts that were also rumored to be aboard this sunken ship.

And so their adventure turns real when the abandoned and tattered ship is discovered hanging precariously off the top of an underwater reef and if disturbed, could fall many fathoms deeper into the bottom of the sea bed too deep for men to swim without dying from the bends.

Of course while the two deep sea divers are in the middle of bringing up the ships treasure they are interrupted by some human sharks who want to steal the treasures after the danger of the deep sea dive is over and the treasures are brought on board their ship. It is quite an adventure and as I said the picture and sound quality are superb for a 1955 film and only enhanced by the attractiveness of both Jane Russell and Lori Nelson. The women viewers will also enjoy the two divers/actors Richard Egan and Gilbert Roland in their tighty whities throughout their underwater dives.

It's a film classic that should be shown on stations such as Turner Classic Films more often in all its glorious color for adventurous film buffs to watch and enjoy over and over.

I give this 1955 adventure film classic a superb 8 out of 10 rating

**MINOR SPOILERS** Midly entertaining sunken treasure adventure movie that's only kept afloat by it's star Jane Russell, Theresa Gray, who's constantly competing in the movie with the breath-taking Caribbean scenery off the coast of Cuba. Finding some underwater artifacts that suggest their from a Spanish Man of War it's decided by the sunken-ship treasure hunters Johnny & Dom, Richard Egan & Gilbert Roland, to get a bigger boat to go back out at sea to recover the hundreds of gold bars and box-loads of priceless gems submerged there.

It takes a while for Johnny to first get his wife Thereas to go along with his, what seemed to her, water logged plan. It's then that Lady Luck struck him and Dom when looking to rent a 50 foot boat from this guy Robinson they finds that he checked out of town and left his boat over to his totally land-locked minded young secretary Gloria, Lori Nelson, who's more then willing to let the two treasure hunters use it.

There's a number of unexpected event happen to the quintet with a local padre Father Cannon ,Robert Keith, coming on board who's only interested in recovering a life size solid gold Virgin Mary statue studded with diamonds to be returned to her rightful owners in the little church in Panama where she originally came from. Later there's this boat-load of shark hunters headed by the scuzzy-looking Rico, Joseph Caileia,looking for garbage from John's boat to use as bait to attract the underwater predators. Rico smells a rat, or a gold bar, when John tells him he and Dom are only looking for underwater rocks to be studied by the professors and students at Havana University.

The movie "Underwater" comes to it's very predictable conclusion when after reaching the underwater sunken treasure site Johnny is left by himself with Dom suffering from the bends. It's then when we finally get to see Theresa or actress Jane Russell, who we earlier briefly saw in a swimsuit, put on her bathing suit and dive underwater to help and possible save her husband, Johnny, from either drowning or getting eaten up by sharks. Theresa for all her efforts gets stuck in the sunken ships wreckage where we then have Johnny making it back to the boat to get her an extra oxygen tank. You wonder why all this was really necessary when Theresa has those two giant natural air supply tanks that can easily keep Theresa breathing for at least a week!

With Johnny and Theresa as well as Dom who heroically came to both their aid, risking his life doing it, back on the boat their again confronted by the shark-hunters who were disarmed and left on shore by Johnny & Dom just a while earlier. We then have another boring battle between them and Johnny & Dom which ends with everybody shaking hands and becoming friends> This happens when one of the shark hunters got very religious, which quickly affected the rest of his crew-mates, over the the fact that all this violence was over a golden statue of the Virgin Mary the mother of the Prince of Peace!

Nothing that you wouldn't expect or want in a movie like "Underwater", except hoping to see a lot more of Jane Russell in a tight swimsuit, with a happy ending without anyone in the film getting killed. With the most seriously injury among the cast being that they got a bit wet under and between the ears and,in the case of Dom, a very bad case of the Caribbean cramps.

Underwater was allegedly set in Cuba, but actually photographed on the Kona Coast of Hawaii, was the last time that Jane Russell worked for Howard Hughes. The mysterious industrialist would shortly be getting rid of RKO Studios and RKO itself would shortly go Underwater after that.

The site of Jane Russell even in a conservative one piece bathing suit was enough to delight the male members of the audience with those twin weapons of mass destruction Jane sported. But if you got around to listening to Jane she drifted in and out of an atrocious Spanish accent. There was no reason to cast her as Hispanic so why she was will remain a mystery.

Like his aerial films Howard Hughes took some really good care with the lavish Underwater photography and it remains the best feature of Underwater, even though the stuff photographed on Kona was supplemented by scenes done in a large tank.

All that though just to tell a rather routine tale of four treasure hunters, Jane Russell, Richard Egan, Gilbert Roland, and Lori Nelson who hunt for and discover an ancient Spanish Galleon loaded with gold bars. But also on board is a solid gold larger than life size statue of Jesus also adorned in jewels that was lost at sea to the Roman Catholic Church. Along for the ride is Jesuit scholar Robert Keith.

The four and Keith also run afoul of shark hunters/smugglers/pirates led by Joseph Calleia. How the plot resolves itself frankly borders on the ridiculous.

But the Underwater photography and the Jane photography make Underwater worthwhile viewing.