You can hardly get any more basic with a title like “Shark!” (shouted, of course), so it’s no wonder it got mostly forgotten in time, its status as a pre-Jaws shark film not helping, hence leave it to the italian home video market to release under the title of “4 Bastards For A Place In Hell” (4 Bastardi Per Un Posto All’Inferno), far more eye-catching and way fuckin better than just “Shark (exclamation mark)” though making one expect to see a spaghetti western, because deception and bullshit was always the name of the game when localizing titles of movies here in Italy.
Though it also can be summed up as “the shark movie with Burt Reynolds in it”, as we have basically a shark-laden style “Treasure Of The Sierra Madre” plot as well, with the protagonist being a gunrunner that loses its cargo near a Sudanese harbor town, making him stuck there, until he’s hired by a woman to help a scientist raid a sunken ship in shark-infested waters for some.. “valuables”.
Pity is, he faces competition from other people hired to do the very same thing..
Not to be confused with 1975’s Shark Treasure by Cornel Wilde, also about a sunken treasure and criminals, and one that also publicized itself on the realism of the sharks in it, because… minds think alike, especially when you’re gonna cash into Jaws’ success.
Actually, this isn’t about sharks defending a sunken treasure, but the tale of a dirtbag asshole yet charming thief & thieg protagonist Caine (Burt Reynolds) and him taking a young boy thief as his apprentice and basically becoming “thief dad of the week”, way more than it is about sharks.
At least in terms of the actual animals and not the human protagonist.
there’s actually very little shark action in “Shark!”, it’s more one of those exotic action adventure thriller with fighting, punching, stealing, scheming, but it’s actually fairly entertanining thanks to Burt Reynolds ability to play tough, womanizing, action dirtbags, utter assholes but with charm to them and the macho factor is even more pronounce as it’s a Samuel Fuller directed film.
It’s dumb, fairly mindless fun even without much shark action and it has an inusual ending for this type of film, and it’s actually got a great cast, including Anthony Kennedy, known for his sophisticated roles, here posing an Arab and uber-hamming it up as the perennialy drunk but super-able town doctor, and Silvia Pinal, whom was in Bunuèl’s Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel, here playing the assistant of a professor that’s also after the sunken treasure.
It would actually be decent for what it is… but due to the poor pacing, i have to scale it down to average/okay, because it’s an issue when the 90 minutes running film feels noticeably longer than that, it really shouldn’t feel as draggy as it does. It’s no wonder the director later, after watching the film in theathers, asked again to have his name taken off the film due to the mess they made of it in editing.. and the production still refused.
Aside from the fact it’s supposed to be Sudan yet even i can tell it’s Mexico (because that where it was shot), which is kind of expected for the era, as it’s cultural sensitivity, the movie also has an odd history, as it was basically disowned by the director after disagreeing with the production on using the footage of a diver being killed while filming a shark (that was supposed to be have been sedated), which explains the otherwise random disclaimer early in the film, that reads:
“This film is dedicated to the fearless stuntmen who repeatedly risked their lives against attacks in shark infested waters during the filming of this picture…”
Which feels like a fuckin joke when they use text from a LIFE magazine article about how a stunt diver died while making the film… in the fuckin poster (seen at the beginning of the review)!
This is some Rene Cardona Jr. level of bad taste (or lack there of)… or so would i say, if the whole ordeal didn’t come off as fabricated for marketing purposes, a good ol’ publicity stunt, since the aforementioned LIFE magazine article from 1968 speaks of a diver called Josè Marco that was attacked by a rogue white shark that was able to enter through the protection nets and disembowled him, leading to his death later when hospitalized.
But there are no records of medical nature, no police reports of the attack, no documents of anyone called Josè Marco that fit the age and description, so i’m gonna take an educated guess and say it was a planned publicity stunt, as planned as changing the title from “Caine!” to “Shark”
If you want more proof and info, you can search for the 1969 november issue of Skin Diver, a scuba diving magazine, where Dewey Bergman investigated on the subject, after the LIFE magazine article discouraged many to dive in the coast of Mexico, and what do you, LIFE ended up pretty much confessing they published a hoax. Journalism, journalism never changes.
But wait, you may say, they did use the footage of “Josè Marco”, after all, it’s what you see in the opening scene…and so what?
The footage is so vaguely shot you can’t tell anyway, i’m inclined to say it isn’t because it would also been harder to push it in theathers, you can say anything in the marketing but having a death on set or pretend to makes more buzz due to the controversy, especially if you got an average and not much else action adventure exotic tale of treasure and conmen to sell at people, and also some footage of real sharks shot for real, as pretty much all pre-Jaws shark flicks opted for realism in the shark department.
Overall, Shark! is light on sharks (literal ones, anyway) but it’s an average action adventure with treasure and thieves set in “exotic lands” from the era, though one with a great cast, and in spite of once again a controversial producton history being more interesting than the film itself, it does make for an okay curiosity that it’s worth at least watching once for shark movie buffs.
Wise Cafe (International) 