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The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway's famous novella The Old Man and the Sea, would seem a difficult book to adapt for the movies. The drama follows a single plot line, the catching and losing of a great fish, and most of the action consists of an old man sitting in a tiny boat talking to himself. For the most famous film treatment, the 1958 movie starring Spencer Tracy, the screenwriter opts to basically recite Hemingway's simple but affecting prose. But the decision to have the prose almost always spoken by Tracy, either as narration or as the old man in his boat, makes the character he plays less interesting for me. It is too difficult to separate the narration about the old man from the thoughts of the old man and he ends up seeming to have godlike insight. True, the character is meant to have a certain wisdom gained from years of struggling with nature, but he is also meant to be a foolish weak mortal caught in the large mystery of life he cannot understand, except through his blind faith in religion and Joe DiMaggio. Tracy does a great job of acting like a poor Cuban fisherman but physically he never seems convincing. He's too well-fed, too white, too much in control. The boy, played by Felipe Pazos in his only known film-acting job, is also somewhat too knowing and too self-possessed to be a real kid of an impoverished fishing village. Nonetheless the scenes between the two of them are touching. I found myself wondering what will happen with them in the future as the man grows weaker and unable to fish and the boy matures and makes his own way in life. A minor complaint about the film is that the stock ocean scenes often seem mismatched with the shots of Tracy in the boat which presumably were filmed on a tank in a studio. Still, the film is well worth viewing for a fan of the book. The director John Sturges also made such action classics as The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. I haven't seen the 1990 made-for-TV British production starring Anthony Quinn, though I hear it's pretty good too. It's easier to imagine the seventy-something, Mexican-born actor as the gaunt, ill-starred fisherman. This film opens up the story somewhat, showing the old man as a young man also, played by Quinn's son Francesco. and even adds the character of Ernest Hemingway (not played by the long-dead author of course). The best Old Man and the Sea though may be the 1999 animated version, a Canadian-Japanese-Russian production with Gordon Pinsent voicing the old man. It was originally made for the gigantic IMAX screen. I haven't seen this one either but it's received critical raves and won an Academy Award for best animated short film. At least three foreign-language adaptations of The Old Man and the Sea have also been filmed, including Brazilian, Chinese and Bulgarian efforts. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2004 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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