Twenty 20-Sharks is a chronological survey of shark attack movies. In this entry, we join Burt Reynolds on a hunt for sunken treasure in Samuel Fuller’s Shark!
Shark attacks are sensational. Not in the sense of being awesome, though that certainly accounts for how many movies they inspire. No, shark attacks are sensational in the supermarket tabloid sense. A person getting bitten—or heaven forbid, killed—by a shark is newsworthy. It happens often enough that people worry about it, but also infrequently enough that when it does happen, it’s front-page news. In truth, you have a 1 in 11.5 million chance of being attacked by a shark in your lifetime. That probability approaches zero the further inland you travel.
Shark! comes from maverick filmmaker Samuel Fuller, whose stories of wartime heroism and tabloid sleaze skirted the boundaries of good taste long before it was fashionable. His films were often low-budget affairs, and this one is no exception. His follow-up to the 1964 tabloid drama The Naked Kiss, Shark! is a ramshackle affair that attracted headlines from the very beginning. A shark attack during production ensured that the movie would garner at least some kind of attention, if it was released at all.
Originally titled “Twist of the Knife”, the film is based loosely on Victor Canning’s 1955 pulp novel “His Bones are Coral”. The novel follows a drug smuggler who finds himself roped into a scheme to dive for coral in shark-infested waters.1 Fuller—probably realizing that no one would believe coral is worth risking your life over—rewrote the story around a plot to recover gold bullion from a sunken ship. And at the center of this story is an American weapons smuggler named Caine2 (Burt Reynolds), on the run from the authorities after they catch him with crates of contraband, and soon finds himself in an [indistinct] port city off the coast of the Red Sea.
The print available on Tubi isn’t great. It’s hard to make out the name everyone keeps saying, and even the subtitles don’t seem certain. Based on the pronunciation and a little amateur cartography, my best guess is Sawakin, just south of Port Sudan. Even if it’s not exact, that’s where the film seems to take place. Not that it matters much—the movie was filmed on the Western coast of Mexico, so we get lots of scenic vistas of the Pacific and Mexican villages standing in for the Sudanese coast.
Caine stumbles into a treasure hunt already in progress. Professor Dan Malare (Barry Sullivan) is after a cache of gold bars on a sunken ship just offshore. As the movie opens, we witness Malare’s first attempt at recovering the treasure, which naturally goes awry. The local diver he hired is unceremoniously eaten by sharks before we even see the title card. After paying her respects and paying off the man’s family, Malare’s daughter Anna (Silvia Pinal) begins the search for a replacement stooge. Enter Caine, who just happens to be the kind of brawny drifter they’re looking for.
But Caine isn’t stupid. He knows a thing or two about grifts. Caine befriends a local kid he catches trying to steal his watch. When he catches up to the boy—whom he affectionately nicknames Runt—he gives him an important lesson: if you’re gonna rob somebody, don’t let them catch you doing it. Meanwhile, Caine is stuck in [indistinct], and comes to the attention of Inspector Barok (Enrique Lucero), who suspects Caine is wanted by Sudanese border patrol. He’s correct, of course, but with no evidence, he has no choice but to hang around until Caine finally does something he can be arrested for.
There’s a long, mostly pointless setup to get us to where Anna asks Caine to join her father’s diving party under the pretense of scientific research. He suspects they’re up to no good, but since he’s trapped in [indistinct] with no money and no resources, he finally agrees. Caine turns out to be too smart for his own good, so at one point, Malare tries to have him killed. He goes to Latalah (Manuel Alvarado), owner of Caine’s hotel, who agrees to have a couple of locals get rid of him. But because this is the sixties, Latalah has to be a big, greasy stereotype who enters the scene like this:
In the ensuing fracas, Caine’s little buddy Runt gets thrown down a flight of stairs and conked out. The only doctor in town is another American, a drunk washout named Doc (Arthur Kennedy), who’s busy either actively trying to get sober, or so strung out and penniless he has no other choice. So at this point, Caine has had it with all these assholes and finally agrees to join Anna and Malare on their little mission.
So finally, finally, we get some more sharks in this movie titled Shark! Caine and Malare go scuba diving down to the sunken ship and manage to open the cache with the hidden gold. As they prep to raise the gold, someone starts dropping chum into the water! And you know what that means: Sharks!
Long story short: The con is on, the double cross happens, and then another. Malare gets eaten by sharks, and we get to witness some genuinely unnerving underwater photography of a stuntman tangling with a shark.
And it’s at this point that we get to talk about what actually got this movie some headlines. According to an issue of Life Magazine, a stuntman was killed by a shark during the film’s production. The issue featured a whole photo spread of a diver and a shark. According to the story, the production had a sedated shark that they used during filming, but then a rogue great white shark entered through the shoot’s safety net and attacked the diver, ultimately killing him.
The story supposedly prompted producers to change the film’s title from Caine to Shark! in order to capitalize on the tragedy (not to mention explaining why the film was taken away from Sam Fuller and re-edited without his input). Problem is, subsequent investigations revealed that the Life Magazine spread was almost certainly a hoax, and that no divers were ever actually in danger during production. But at that point, the damage had been done, the controversy had already been used to sell magazines and movie tickets, etc.
Fuller ultimately disowned the film after producers recut it, going so far as to ask that they take his name off of it. They refused, and Fuller remains credited for the picture. So there it is: Shark! was very nearly an Alan Smithee production.
While Shark! features a bit of Fuller’s signature rough-and-tumble attitude, it’s frankly too generic and cut-rate to really warrant all that attention. The relationship between Caine and Runt is the best part of the movie, and there’s just not enough of it. You can see echoes of the relationship between Indiana Jones and Short Round in Temple of Doom in these two3.
Shark! is available on Tubi, but you really have to look for it. That’s partly because the title is so generic, but also because the thumbnail they used looks just like every other garbage clickbait shark movie. Burt Reynolds’ name is right there on top, so if you’re really curious, keep a lookout for Burt.
FINAL RATING
2.5 stars (out of five). Too much controversy, not enough sharks.
NEXT TIME: Blue Water, White Death (1971)
- I hate that I have to quote Wikipedia on this one, but they said it more succinctly than I could have.
↩︎ - The script went through development hell for years before Sam Fuller came onboard. He rewrote the script himself and changed the title to simply Caine.
↩︎ - Short Round was literally named after and inspired by the character of Short Round in Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet. So this must have just been one of Fuller’s favorite character types, the kid sidekick to the hard-boiled hero.
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