Main Cast: Spencer Tracy, Felipe Pazos, Harry Bellaver, Donald Diamond, Don Blackman
Release Year: 1958
Country: US
Run Time: 86 minutes
Plot
Ernest Hemingway's short novel The Old Man and the Sea was probably unfilmable to begin with, but this didn't stop John Sturges from trying to cinematize Hemingway's tight little character study. Spencer Tracy is the Old Man, a Cuban fisherman who tries to haul in a huge fish that he catches far from shore. Tracy's tiny boat is besieged by sharks and by natural elements, but the Old Man stubbornly sticks to his job. In the end, the fish is nothing more than a skeleton, and the Old Man returns to his tiny hovel to "dream about the lions." Spencer Tracy may have been dreaming about the Oscar when he agreed to make this film, but Old Man and the Sea is defeated by pretentiousness and by several unconvincing "sea" scenes shot in a studio tank (even though both Tracy and director Sturges underwent incredible hardships filming in a real boat on the real ocean). Old Man and the Sea was remade as a 1990 made-for-TV movie starring Anthony Quinn, which compounded the mistakes made in the Tracy version by grafting on a pointless love story. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Though director John Sturges shot The Old Man and the Sea all over the Western hemisphere, his screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novella feels like a one-man stage play broken up by some nature footage. Luckily, the lead is one of cinema's most enduring and popular stars, Spencer Tracy. Though the film's narration may be somewhat pretentious, Tracy keeps the character likable and breathes some life into the script. The actor appears to have been bitten by the Method-acting bug that had been going around Hollywood in the 1950s: his intuitive performance suggests "James Dean and the Sea" more than Hemingway's version. The most striking moments are the scenes of the sharks attacking the boat; though Sturges was well known for his classic action movies (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape), two uncredited directors (Fred Zinnemann and Henry King) worked on the film, and it's possible that Sturges was not responsible for the attack. ~ Brendon Hanley, All Movie Guide
Edward Carrere - Art Director, Art Loel - Art Director, John Sturges - Director, Arthur P. Schmidt - Editor, Dimitri Tiomkin - Composer (Music Score), Dimitri Tiomkin - Musical Direction/Supervision, Lamar Boren - Cinematographer, Floyd D.Crosby - Cinematographer, James Wong Howe - Cinematographer, Thomas Tutwiler - Cinematographer, Leland Hayward, Sr. - Producer, Ralph S. Hurst - Set Designer, Arthur S. Rhoades - Special Effects, Peter Viertel - Screenwriter, Ernest Hemingway - Short Story Author
