Tonight at the Museum of Modern Art, the people who supervised its 3-D restoration explained that Leonard Maltin gave this a Bomb rating and speculated that it was because he had seen it in a flat pan-and-scan version on TV; if one saw it as the film makers intended, in a theater, in 3-D, it was pretty good.
Yes and no. Anything with a screenplay by W.R. Burnett will have my respectful attention, and I have long liked Joanne Dru, well more than her career calls for; her appearance in two John Ford westerns and RED RIVER is more than enough in the way of credentials for me. Also, Byron Haskins uses the 3-D cameras to record underwater Technicolor like nobody's business. As the first half of the story progressed, I was uncomfortable with Asher Dann's monotonic performance as Majorcan eye candy for the girls, but could see the way that Burnett's script was leading the cast into a sordid tale of cross and double cross, with a fight over sunken gold and Joanne Dru. true, Robert Strauss as the dumb wisecracker he had played in STALAG 17 couldn't manage a decent line reading either, but at least Miss Dru and Mark Stevens could... and some of the lines were stinkers.
Still, it was going along well enough. Until the intermission, and when we returned, three sailors couldn't figure out how to get sea weed out of the propellers. Nor do Portuguese man-of-wars act like that. So long as the plot dealt with human greed and weakness, it was fine. Apparently Burnett has no interest in the sea, its flora nor its fauna, even though that's about half the movie.
As a result, my opinion of this movie went from "Very good. Maybe excellent" to "Watchable". It stayed that way for the rest of the picture, even as I noted the sharks made of rubber and the plot holes; the camera-work remained great.
Which means that the fellows were right. It didn't deserve the Bomb rating that Maltin gave it. But neither should you watch it except in 3-D.
Yes and no. Anything with a screenplay by W.R. Burnett will have my respectful attention, and I have long liked Joanne Dru, well more than her career calls for; her appearance in two John Ford westerns and RED RIVER is more than enough in the way of credentials for me. Also, Byron Haskins uses the 3-D cameras to record underwater Technicolor like nobody's business. As the first half of the story progressed, I was uncomfortable with Asher Dann's monotonic performance as Majorcan eye candy for the girls, but could see the way that Burnett's script was leading the cast into a sordid tale of cross and double cross, with a fight over sunken gold and Joanne Dru. true, Robert Strauss as the dumb wisecracker he had played in STALAG 17 couldn't manage a decent line reading either, but at least Miss Dru and Mark Stevens could... and some of the lines were stinkers.
Still, it was going along well enough. Until the intermission, and when we returned, three sailors couldn't figure out how to get sea weed out of the propellers. Nor do Portuguese man-of-wars act like that. So long as the plot dealt with human greed and weakness, it was fine. Apparently Burnett has no interest in the sea, its flora nor its fauna, even though that's about half the movie.
As a result, my opinion of this movie went from "Very good. Maybe excellent" to "Watchable". It stayed that way for the rest of the picture, even as I noted the sharks made of rubber and the plot holes; the camera-work remained great.
Which means that the fellows were right. It didn't deserve the Bomb rating that Maltin gave it. But neither should you watch it except in 3-D.