I read The Old Man and the Sea sometime in high school, and I recall thinking it was pretty solid; I didn’t know that it’s generally considered second-tier Hemingway and that if it won the Pulitzer and was specifically mentioned in his Nobel citation, it was because he was incredibly overdue. No matter; it was warmly received at the time, sold well, and given the success of other Hemingway adaptations, it was no surprise that The Old Man was itself adapted for the screen.
Or maybe “adapted” isn’t quite the word: “transcribed” might be more accurate, and that’s why the film, despite some measure of acclaim at the time (which I’ll detail later), is hardly the classic the novel became and, in a popular sense at least, remains.
The story, of course, is quite simple. Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, has gone 84 days without a catch and is considered unlucky. Because of this, Manolin, the young boy who used to fish with him, has had to join another, luckier boat, but he remains devoted to Santiago and indulges his various pretenses. On the 85th day, Santiago sets out as usual, and after a few hours hooks a big, deep-swimming fish, which pulls his boat farther and farther out to sea, and the old man struggles to maintain his hold on the line for a full day and more, developing a great respect for his quarry.
Eventually the fish, an enormous marlin, surfaces, and Santiago is able to wrangle it close enough to the boat to harpoon it, killing it. But as he sails back to Cuba, sharks attack the corpse of the marlin, and despite his efforts, only the head and the spine of the fish are left by the time he gets home. But it is not for nothing; he has proven himself once more.
The story is at once a simple adventure story and a meditation on strength and tenacity, on what a man must do to survive in this difficult world. Santiago, despite his poverty, his bad luck, his age, his loneliness, and his suffering, does not give up the marlin, does not let the sharks eat it without a fight, and when he returns home, walks back to his shack by himself, even as it takes him a long while and requires many stops. It may not be Hemingway’s best work by any means, but it was a success for a reason.
And the film was a failure for a reason, if not several reasons. For me, what kills the film more than anything is the choice to include so much of the book as voiceover—whole passages are recited, and the film at times feels like an illustrated audiobook. But Hemingway’s prose is so notably spare and direct that, for the most part, it only needed to be translated into visual terms, and much of the time, that’s just what director John Sturges does. So much of the time, we’re literally just hearing descriptions of what we’re already seeing, and the effect is fairly numbing.
Hell, at one point we actually have the narrator speaking the words spoken by the onscreen characters, and they just mouth along! It looks weird and sounds clunky as all hell.
I don’t know if screenwriter Peter Viertel retained so much of the book’s text at the studio’s behest, at Hemingway’s, or on his own initiative, but it’s a choice that almost single-handedly kills the film. Had the film only trusted its own images to tell the story (or at least the bulk of it), it would’ve been considerably more effective. It’s too bad the DVD doesn’t offer the option to watch the film with only Dmitri Tiomkin’s score on the soundtrack; I imagine that would be at least a little better.
Of course, there is some dialogue, as Santiago talks to himself while alone at sea, and to the marlin as he tangles with it. But the dialogue is not very good—”Fish, I love and respect you very much” may not be great on the page, but spoken aloud, at least as it is here, it’s laughable.
As a side-note, 40 years after this film, there was a Russian animated short adaptation of the book which won an Oscar and, I believe, had no dialogue at all, just images and music. I haven’t seen it, but I would think it does better by the book than this film does.
But the animators could make Santiago look precisely as they wanted him to, whilst Sturges had Spencer Tracy to work with. Now, Tracy was a fine actor, a great one at his best, and he provides the narration here, which he delivers well. But his on-screen performance leaves much to be desired. He conveys Santiago’s age and fatigue effectively enough—58 at the time, he was already in declining health and he looks much older than he was. But as a poor Cuban fisherman, he never seems like anything other than Spencer Tracy in rags, with just a touch of an accent. Yes, he’d won an Oscar 21 years earlier playing a Portuguese fisherman in Captains Courageous, but who nowadays thinks that was a good choice?
When he’s talking to Manolin, Tracy is decently avuncular and personable. But in the fishing scenes, and especially when he’s actually speaking aloud to the fish, there’s just no suspension of disbelief. The wry humor that Tracy used so well in, say, Inherit the Wind makes the already awkward dialogue here sound comical. It’s not that Tracy doesn’t try, but that the task is all wrong for his abilities. Anthony Quinn was apparently a contender for the role, and would play it 32 years later in a TV adaptation. He certainly would’ve been more, if not unequivocally, convincing.
What isn’t convincing is much of the film itself. Whilst a great deal of location filming was done to get footage of the sea and the all-important marlin, most of the scenes with Tracy in the boat were shot in a studio, and it shows. The process shots might have been impressive for 1958 (might, I say), but now they look quite bad, and when Santiago is clubbing at the sharks towards the end of the film, there’s no question we’re just seeing Spencer Tracy in a tank, hitting the water with a stick. The film cost something like $5 million, a lot for the time, but it looks cheap, a mishmash of stock footage and professionally lit studio shots.
That’s a shame, because James Wong Howe’s cinematography is quite good when it’s allowed to be. The haunting dawns and dusks, the isolated figure of Santiago shuffling home at night, the tiny boat at sea, and the soft, bright memories of Santiago’s childhood in Africa are quite lovely to behold. The film is visually inconsistent (and the available DVD doesn’t look great; it badly needs a restoration), but it does have its redeeming images. And Tiomkin’s score, when it isn’t fighting to be heard over the endless narration, is a nice one, especially the eerie chanting of the fishermen, most notably used at the very end of the film.
Aside from Tracy, the only notable performance is Felipe Pazos Jr. as Manolin, and he’s unfortunately not very good, delivering his lines with little inflection or emotion. He’s not completely terrible—you can at least believe this is a boy who’s older than his years in a lot of ways—but he’s lackluster and doesn’t do much to boost his scenes with Tracy.
As I said above, the film met with some acclaim at the time. It actually won the NBR award for Best Film, and Tracy won Best Actor for this and his role in John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (which I need to see). 1958 wasn’t a banner year for cinema, but certainly the NBR erred in picking this over The Long, Hot Summer (which made their Top 10) or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which did the same and got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture). I’ll forgive them for passing over Touch of Evil, since it wasn’t a major critical success at the time.
As for the Oscars, Tiomkin won for his score, beating the rather better score of The Big Country (the main theme of that score is easily more memorable than anything in Old Man), while Howe was nominated for his cinematography, losing to the fairly unremarkable work in Gigi, and Tracy was nominated for Best Actor, losing to David Niven for Separate Tables (for a performance with something like 16 minutes of screen-time).
But now, if Old Man is remembered, I suspect it’s either by students who’ve watched it after (or instead) of reading the book, or by those who regard it as a well-intentioned failure, not so much a bad film—it’s not—as one that never truly brings the book to life. In the book, Santiago’s struggle and victory against the marlin is not totally wiped out by the sharks’ eating it, but what little triumph there was in making a film of the book at all is lost in the fact that it did nothing to improve on it.
Score: 61
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