Spencer Tracy is Santiago, an old impoverished Cuban fisherman who has had eighty-four days of bad luck and is being helped to survive by a young boy of the village. Tracy takes his little fishing boat farther out than usual, lands a giant marlin after a fierce three-day struggle, and then loses his trophy to the sharks who tear the great fish to pieces, leaving only the head, spine, and tail.
If it get off to something of a slow start, it nevertheless involves us in Tracy's fate all the way. There are lyrical interludes while Tracy watches the birds, the flying fish, the porpoises, and dreams of lions on the African shore. He follows the baseball in the newspapers and admires Joe DiMaggio.
And the battles are monumental. Tracy has to fight the huge marlin, then the multitude of sharks that attack it, and -- constantly -- his own age and fatigue. The viewer gets to feel the desperation behind all of these contests. Tracy pulls it off with the help of Dmitri Tiomkin's somewhat bombastic score, with its echoes of "Rio Bravo" and "High Noon." There are three problems though. First, modern viewers have been spoiled by recent advances in special effects and process work. The marlin, seen up close, looks like the rubber bladder it is, even when disguised by the blurry image representing Tracy's dizziness. After it's been stripped by the sharks, the spine looks like a lead pipe bought at the local plumber's, with a few plastic ribs attached. The scenes of the marlin leaping out of the sea aren't well integrated with the studio footage.
Second -- and let's face facts -- Big Ernie doesn't translate well to the screen. His bare-bones attempts at thought-provoking folk poetry come across as stilted and sometimes risible.
Tracy (to himself): "Do not blame the hand. It is not the hand's fault." (To his cramped hand): "You have been a long time with the fish." Third, there is a problem with the casting. Harry Bellaver is a pug, or a cop, or a reporter in Hollywood movies. He is not a Cuban bartender; he is not strong and has no aficion. Most of all, there is a problem with Spencer Tracy, an actor whom I deeply admire. Even my crude Irish stepfather from Charlestown who never had a sensitive thought in his life, was once moved to say, "Y'know, he's a good-lookin' guy. I don't mean handsome, but manly." But Tracy is not a poor Cuban fisherman. Ernie himself said Tracy "looks like a fat, rich actor." He didn't care for the boy either, who looked like "a cross between a tadpole and Anita Loos." I'm certain I've read somewhere that Hemingway was among the spectators at the arm wrestling contest flashback but I'm not sure it's true.
Despite these deficiencies, the author, the cast and crew pull it off. Hemingway had Hispanic fatalism down pat. In the face of what we would call bad luck, they become Stoics. That Olympian generalization isn't mine. A Latin American professor devoted an entire lecture to it. It's a moving and tragic story touching on Hemingway's familiar themes of pride and defeat. As Hemingway has the fisherman say, "You can destroy a man but you can not defeat him," to which I'm tempted to reply, "Like hell, you can't."
If it get off to something of a slow start, it nevertheless involves us in Tracy's fate all the way. There are lyrical interludes while Tracy watches the birds, the flying fish, the porpoises, and dreams of lions on the African shore. He follows the baseball in the newspapers and admires Joe DiMaggio.
And the battles are monumental. Tracy has to fight the huge marlin, then the multitude of sharks that attack it, and -- constantly -- his own age and fatigue. The viewer gets to feel the desperation behind all of these contests. Tracy pulls it off with the help of Dmitri Tiomkin's somewhat bombastic score, with its echoes of "Rio Bravo" and "High Noon." There are three problems though. First, modern viewers have been spoiled by recent advances in special effects and process work. The marlin, seen up close, looks like the rubber bladder it is, even when disguised by the blurry image representing Tracy's dizziness. After it's been stripped by the sharks, the spine looks like a lead pipe bought at the local plumber's, with a few plastic ribs attached. The scenes of the marlin leaping out of the sea aren't well integrated with the studio footage.
Second -- and let's face facts -- Big Ernie doesn't translate well to the screen. His bare-bones attempts at thought-provoking folk poetry come across as stilted and sometimes risible.
Tracy (to himself): "Do not blame the hand. It is not the hand's fault." (To his cramped hand): "You have been a long time with the fish." Third, there is a problem with the casting. Harry Bellaver is a pug, or a cop, or a reporter in Hollywood movies. He is not a Cuban bartender; he is not strong and has no aficion. Most of all, there is a problem with Spencer Tracy, an actor whom I deeply admire. Even my crude Irish stepfather from Charlestown who never had a sensitive thought in his life, was once moved to say, "Y'know, he's a good-lookin' guy. I don't mean handsome, but manly." But Tracy is not a poor Cuban fisherman. Ernie himself said Tracy "looks like a fat, rich actor." He didn't care for the boy either, who looked like "a cross between a tadpole and Anita Loos." I'm certain I've read somewhere that Hemingway was among the spectators at the arm wrestling contest flashback but I'm not sure it's true.
Despite these deficiencies, the author, the cast and crew pull it off. Hemingway had Hispanic fatalism down pat. In the face of what we would call bad luck, they become Stoics. That Olympian generalization isn't mine. A Latin American professor devoted an entire lecture to it. It's a moving and tragic story touching on Hemingway's familiar themes of pride and defeat. As Hemingway has the fisherman say, "You can destroy a man but you can not defeat him," to which I'm tempted to reply, "Like hell, you can't."