Tubarão

Based on a novel (which I've read) by Victor Canning. Mexico stands in for a squalid town in the Sudan where a group of seedy characters are stranded. Barry Sullivan is the grumpy honcho with the shady moves. A fortune in submerged gold in a shipwreck in shark-infested waters is the prize. Burt Reynolds, channeling the Wages of Fear, has reason to sweat: he has to carry a long and boring sub-plot concerning his "relationship" with a scroungy little street kid until the main plot kicks in. Arthur Kennedy(I think he was supposed to be an Arab. He's wearing a fez, anyway) shamelessly hams it up as the town drunk.Sure, Burt Reynolds is trapped in the dead-end of the Sudan, yet shirtless in some tight white pants he comes across as cocky as his chest is hairy.

Sam Fuller's hard-boiled sensibilities surface in the existential dialog: "Just getting up in the morning is a risk." The main trouble with the film, aside from the horrendous post-production hack-job performed upon it by the clueless producers, is the dull and draggy pace. With a few judicious trims and without the wholesale chop chop this could be a much better film. Also the old source print is so dark at times it is impossible to tell what is happening. As it stands it is a curiosity, worth watching at least once, but nothing more.

This is a violent adventure movie that earned notoriety because of on location tragedy , as a stunt diver was really killed by a shark . It is a typical Reynoldsian action-infested dumbness with plenty of thrills , brawls and violent confrontations . It deals with an American gun smuggler (Burt Reynolds) stranded in a tiny port and near a small coastal Sudanese town . He's stuck there when a woman (Silvia Pinal) hires him to a dangerous mission , as he sees a chance to compensate for his losses . He's not the only one and he soon uncovers the boat's owner (Barry Sullivan) and his colleague are attempting to retrieve gold bullion that lies deep in shark-infested waters .

In making this underwater adventure yarn a stuntman , an experimented diver , was killed by a shark . Freak weather conditions drove hundreds of huge fish down the California coast into the Mexican eaters where director and actors were shooting . Like ¨Twilight Zone : The movie¨ by John Landis , in which died Vic Morrow at a helicopter crash , here was dead a stuntman called José Marco . Notorious underwater explorer Jacques Costeau commented that despite its cruelty , he had never before known a white killer shark attack a man in so vicious a manner which was little consolation for the relatives of the stuntman . Two-fisted and tough acting by Burt Reynolds as a gunrunner loses his cargo and carries out a risked raid a sunken ship in the shark-infested waters . The film benefits itself from a nice support cast , such as Silvia Pinal , Barry Sullivan , the Mexican Enrique Lucero and Arthur Kennedy as a drunk doctor .

It contains an anti-climatic and inappropriate musical score . The movie displays a colorful cinematography by Raúl Martínez Solares considered to be one of the best Mexican cameramen , including titles as "The River and Death", "Illusion Travels by Streetcar¨ by Buñuel and "Santo vs. the Riders of Terror" , ¨Santo vs. Blue Moon¨ , ¨Santa Claus¨ and many others . The motion picture was badly made by Samuel Fuller and edited without his consent , who disowned it . Fuller being especially known as filmmaker of such exploitation films as ¨Shock corridor¨ and ¨The naked kiss¨ where he proved his talent of vision and intelligence . Fuller made various Westerns as ¨I shot Jesse James(49)¨, ¨The baron of Arizona (50)¨, ¨Run of the arrow¨ (56) , ¨Forty guns(58)¨, and ¨The meanest men in the West (76)¨ , but his most fluid and strongest work lies in his war films as ¨Steel helmet (51)¨ , ¨Fixed bayonets (52)¨, ¨Hell and high water (55)¨, ¨China gate (57)¨ , ¨Merrill's Marauders (62)¨ and ¨The Big Red One (80)¨. Being his best films : ¨Pick up on South Street¨(53) , ¨Underworld Usa¨(60) and ¨White Dog¨(82) . Rating Shark ¡: the film is itself below average .

Stranded American with dubious origins takes a job as a deckhand aboard the vessel of a marine biologist and his attractive assistant as a means to escape the Sudan. Amid all the fisticuffs and double-crossing, a few people are mauled by a rogue shark. Ostensibly a sunken treasure picture, this film was notorious at the time of its release after one of the stunt divers was fatally mauled by a supposedly sedated shark, but this notoriety doesn't warrant any serious speculation into the film itself, which lacks excitement.

Burt Reynolds as the gun-running Caine, while affable, isn't given the dialogue to make a memorable impression, while his supporting cast (some of distinction), also labour pointlessly with limited material. Mexican based actress Silvia Pinal is visually striking, but her characterisation is a muddled contradiction of sympathy and cruel indifference (that perhaps is not attributable to her interpretation, but the standard of the script).

The scenery is uninteresting, the minor players are obscure and hollow (with the exception of Runt, the cheeky, cigar smoking Mexican boy whom Caine befriends) and the sight and sound elements are amateurish. Director Fuller reportedly was so ambivalent about the movie, he distanced himself to the point of requesting his name be removed from the credits (which was declined). Despite this, Fuller's appreciation of film noir is evident in the characterisations, dialogue and staging, which at times, is strangely reminiscent of a film noir.

Though the title "Shark" bares some (scant) relevance to the plot, it's hardly a campaign of terror; three mangled corpses does not one shark movie make. Reynolds spends most of his time fighting, shaving and berating poor old Arthur Kennedy for being a hopeless drunk. In the end, everyone gets their comeuppance to varying degrees; some in the jaws of an unimpressive (in terms of threatening appearance, perhaps two metres at most) shark, others in more subtle fashion. Perhaps inspection of the novel on which this so-called film is based ("His Bones Are Coral" by Victor Canning) might glean some light on just why some distinguished film-makers elected to participate in such a mediocre picture.

It being said that Shark is far from being what co-writer/director Samuel Fuller envisioned is right on the money. Or rather, lacking money, because this film seems to have been made with change that fell from the pockets of the producers. It's another film that looks and feels like it was made with the grit and gusto of a man with a need to tell a story, but unfortunately it's quite compromised. On the DVD- not too unfitting released by Troma- the special features go to lengths to explain what became of the film once it was completed, and taken out of Fuller's hands to even include (at the START of the film) a real lethal shark attack. That the film, ironically, is not the total disaster that Fuller thought it was once he saw what the producers did, is a credit to him and first-time movie star Burt Reynolds.

Now, as long as you're not a stickler for little things like, say, continuity (check out that beard, or how it withers scene to scene, for example), the film isn't a total waste. For one thing it still carries the memorably tough wit of some of Fuller's noir films of the 50s, and he still makes his mark on the film in spurts, as one can tell through its fractured, ultra low-budget qualities (i.e. made in Mexico with a shamble for Sudanese sets, if that's what they are). He also gets a little cool gusto out of Reynolds, who would later bloom, so to speak, as a major star in his own right. Here, however, he's still finding his feet some of the time, so it goes without saying that it's more machismo and presence than real 'acting' up on screen. He plays Caine, a mercenary gun seller with a predilection for wacky danger (i.e. tossing dynamite out of his car to thwart those on his tail at the start). He gets recruited by a tempting female who offers him a chance to dig up gold in a sunken ship...all in shark infested waters! When these scenes do finally come up after a lot of plot line subterfuge, it's hit or miss.

Then again, this is long before Jaws, so if the temptation to hear a really rousing score over the underwater scenes does strike you, it speaks to not just that film's strengths but how Shark! doesn't quite realize all of its potential. It wouldn't be 100% fair to blame just the producers for the bits of fiasco, because even through what is quite good that Fuller pulls off on screen (I liked the small chase in the village with the boy and the watch, and a few of the more blatantly exciting moments with Reynolds in his underwater garb), he doesn't have that much of a really terrific story to work with to start with. Maybe it's a combination of factors, but that it's Sam Fuller's weakest movie I've seen of his films is both a credit to what he could do with what could possibly have been a real Z-grade stinker and a tome to what he couldn't do with un-supportive, conniving producers. Probably worth a good, dumb time for drinking buddies, however.

Burt Reynolds (who never looked more homoerotic macho) plays an American criminal/gundealer in the middle east. After losing all his guns and money in a bust, he starts helping a beautiful blonde and her elderly sugardaddy dive for gold in the shark-filled waters of Sudan. What saves this pretty routine story is the "Fuller edge" put on the charcters: once again he is dealing with cynical, greedy anti-heroes, actually more complex than the lightweight story requires. Imagine a b-movie version of (the overrated) John Huston movie "Treasure of Sierra Madre" set in Sudan and with a bunch of hungry sharks thrown in for good measure, and you got a pretty good idea of what to expect. Also, it's interesting to see a pre-Jaws (pre-Jaws clone, pre-lousy italian Jaws clone, pre-computer animated Jaws clone...) shark-movie. It makes you realise just how groundbreaking Spielberg's movie actually was.

Conclusion: Director Samuel Fuller has made both worse and far better movies than this. If you're a fan of his, or simply want a REAL film in these days of plastic moviemaking, by all means check this out. You probably won't end up loving it, but you'll probably agree it's a perfectly acceptable way to spend 90 minutes of your life. Give it a try.

6.5/10