Shark (1969) Review

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(More customer reviews)A young man, scuba diving in the Red Sea off the coast of Sudan is killed by a shark. Anna (Silvia Pinal) who with "the Professor" (Barry Sullivan) had been his employer is seen paying off his mother...now the two must find someone new to help them in their hazardous (and semi-secretive) operation, but none of the locals are interested, understandably. But wait! Here's Caine (Burt Reynolds), an American gun-runner who winds up in town tired, dirty and broke after losing his truck and weapons shipment after a chase at a border crossing - maybe he's just the sucker they need!. Anna tries to seduce him, while Caine is trying everything to get passage out of this little town, and back to civilization. He meets Doc (Arthur Kennedy) a drunken American ex-pat who may or may not be a real doctor, and Runt (Carlos Barry), a kid who tries to steal his watch but soon becomes a fast friend, and the two become his only real allies as he eventually falls in with Anna and the Professor's underhanded schemes, and eventually must face...SHARKS!
How and why the great, great Samuel Fuller ended up cowriting and directing this Mexican-produced low-budget piece - his first since his 1964 masterpiece The Naked Kiss - I don't know. The stories go that he had lots of problems with the film, and it was taken away and recut by the producers. Certainly the end result isn't very satisfactory, and it's no wonder he wanted his name taken off it (though that never happened). The whole thing is suffused with cheapness - most of the secondary cast is pretty bad, the marketplace that is a major set for a couple of scenes is laughably tiny, the underwater footage is all obvious stock material that doesn't mesh with the rest of the film, and the film is all, or nearly all, postdubbed. The narrative has quite a few abrupt elisions; it's simple enough that I don't think anybody's going to have trouble following it, but certainly it makes the film choppy. The odd music by Rafael Moroyoqui doesn't really evoke Africa where the film is set or Mexico where it was filmed.
But it's not a total loss. Reynolds manages to rise a little above the material with charm and a sort of lazy animal sexual charisma; this was the fourth film he made that was released in 1969, very much his breakout year - and those who find his physical charms enticing will be glad to know that he's bare-chested through much of the film. And Arthur Kennedy is excellent as the worn-out, cynical drunk Doc, and he seems somehow to fit into this low-rent "Casablanca"-type setting, almost enough so that you can imagine him and Reynolds for a moment or two in an earlier, bigger-budgeted noir or exotic drama of the 40s, back when they could turn out this stuff every week, and do it a lot better than Fuller managed in 1969. There are a couple of decent action scenes where the old, punchy Fuller style seems in evidence, and the dialogue isn't bad when it's more about the characters and not so much about driving the simple plot forward.
I have the old, crappy VHS - apparently the Troma DVD isn't any better; both are full-screen, though I'm not sure what the original aspect ratio was - probably not Cinemascope or anything. I can't recommend this really to anybody but big fans of Fuller or Reynolds; I've seen most of the former's work and love it, and this is one of his weakest films. I'm glad I have it, it's not without some small merit - but I wouldn't be missing much if my copy went swimming with the sharks.

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Burt Reynolds gives the most amazing performance of his young career in the role, which launched his sex symbol status. The combination of brilliant direction from Samuel Fuller and specialized, dangerous stunt dives (the shark infested waters claimed the life of one stunt man during filming, Life Magazine even ran pictures of Shark's tragedy!) make this film more frighteningly real and original than even Steven Spielberg's box office smash Jaws. Showcasing the rugged badlands of the Middle East and the exotic coastal cities of the Mediterranean Sea, Shark! focuses on a smooth-talking gunrunner who loses his shipment and gets stranded in a small Mediterranean port city. But this is no sleepy fishing village.There's treasure in the waters, and the hunt is on as the action heats up above and below the ocean surface. Shark combines the brilliant, edgy direction of Samuel Fuller with stunning and dangerous stunt-diving work that involved the use of a real life Great White shark.DVD Features -Disc includes in-depth interviews on the films of Samuel Fuller with Jerry Rudes, co-editor of Fuller's autobiography, and producer Eric Sherman. -Shark! also includes an exclusive interview with legendary director Vincent Sherman on Hollywood Blacklisting, as well as film discussion with the Tromaville Film Society. -Digitally mastered exclusive DVD debut of the highly successful 1969 theatrical release. -Discussion from the Tromaville Film Society on the influence of Shark! in the world of independent film. -Introduction by Lloyd Kaufman, Troma president and creator of the Toxic Avenger

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The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (Two-Disc Special Edition) (2005) Review

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(More customer reviews)Whenever I would catch it on cable years and years ago, Sam Fuller's "The Big Red One" was a quirky war movie with strange pacing and a very uneven balance of comedy and tragedy, of high and low-- several great moments strung loosely together. Working on the upcoming DVD, I was not aware of the fact that Fuller had shot 4 hours or that he wished to his dying day that the film would be lengthened, and I was skeptical as I always am with extended versions (this one carries the subtitle "Reconstruction"). I got to look at it several times, once for business and twice more for pleasure, because the film is transformed and made great, and there are so many memorable scenes that one wants to go back to it again and again. 40-plus minutes have been added on, some full scenes, some simply extended bits to old scenes. The narrative structure of the movie is still very free and loose, very episodic, but the greater length is absolutely crucial to the plot, since we are meant to get at least some slight idea of the tedium and homesickness that goes along with being a soldier in an ongoing war. Fleshed out is the character and performance of Lee Marvin--everything that he is capable of as an actor, everything that that stone wall of a face can convey is on display here--tough as all hell but with a simultaneous sweetness that can be, when called upon, heartbreaking. Look at his expression when a gunfight breaks out after the Italian girl places flowers on his helmet--he jabs the rifle into position along his chin and begins firing rounds, his face jerking only slighty with each shot. We don't see anything of the gunfight, only close-up on his face and the expression says nothing and everything all at once--we're meant to meet him halfway and fill in the blanks ourselves. He makes it easy for us because by this point in the movie we know what kind of a man he is. And because this is Sam Fuller, the movie has a diabolical sense of humor, sometimes downright hilarious, as when some of the boys swap sexual fantasies, some of which have become warped and deranged after so much time in battle. Another sequence has the Sergeant and the boys of the One helping to deliver a baby inside the belly of a German tank--the mispronunciation of the French word for "push" setting the stage for some verbal slapstick. This juggling of moods doesn't seem quite so out of place in the longer version, and I get the impression that if they ever decide to cut together the 4-hour picture that Fuller had intended, we still wouldn't tire of the characters or their tours of duty. But as it stands now at 2 hours, 40 minutes, it has been rounded out for us and has jumped to the top of the heap alongside the small handful of truly important movies depicting war. The most common complaint I hear is that the German tanks are clearly American tanks dressed-up. This is true-- if you are searching for dead-on accuracy and detail in set design such as in Private Ryan, this is not for you. "The Big Red One" is a gritty personal little movie that is not burdened by the kind of strained sentimentality that sometimes hampers Spielberg. It can be at times surreal and absurd, but not the kind of surrealism that floats above and transcends the actual war as in "Apocalypse Now"-- it keeps its feet firmly on the ground. The tanks don't pass the test, but the characters more than make up for it... Lee Marvin's nameless Sergeant, stone-faced, intransigent, whose tragic prologue sets up a touching epilogue... Keith Carradine's cigar-chomping, novel-writing Private Zab-- a fill-in for Fuller, who lived all these experiences in his days with the Big Red One-- and Mark Hamill's Griff, the most fleshed-out character, whose unforgettable finale in the Falkenau concentration camp gives new meaning to Conrad's notion of "shelling the bush". The Falkenau scenes, by the way, were shot, like much of the movie, in Israel with Jews playing the Nazi wardens--a surrealistic slap in the face to anyone itching for strict realism in their war flicks. Inconsistencies be damned. This is a great one, and now, thanks to Richard Schickel and his gang, a fuller Fuller movie, a very generous update of a picture that never got a fair chance its first time around.

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DVD Features: Audio CommentaryDocumentariesPhoto galleryTV SpotTheatrical Trailer

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