(2 of 2)
The Old Man and the Sea (Leland Hayward; Warner) suffered from a variety of production ills. Star Spencer Tracy had hot and cold flashes of temperament. Director Fred Zinnemann began the picture, withdrew and was replaced by John Sturges. Producer Leland Hayward went nearly $3,000,000 over his budget (to $5,000,000) as he dispatched camera crews to the Caribbean, the Pacific and a tank on the Warner lot in search of suitable fish footage. What has finally reached the screen is, according to Director Sturges, "technically the sloppiest picture I have ever made." The color is rheumy; the process shots would have been laughable in 1939. But the production problems are minor in comparison with the story problem: Hemingway's fable is no more suitable for the screen than The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
In Old Man, Hemingway was fishing for greatness, for another Moby Dick. Like Melville, he was less interested in the physical events of the story than in their metaphysical significance. The fish is Life; the fisherman is Man. But to photograph these grand abstractions requires a lens more sensitive than any the Warner studio seems to have discovered in its locker. Most of the time all the spectator sees is Spencer Tracy sitting in a rowboat and mumbling to himself, and all he hears is Hemingway's own narrative prosing along the sound track.
The script follows the book in almost every detail. The old man comes ashore after his 84th straight day without hooking a fish. A boy (Felipe Pazos), who once fished with him and loves him, helps him with his gear, buys him a beer and some food, talks him to sleep. Next morning the old man sets out again, and from there until he returns three days later with the mutilated skeleton of the marlin lashed to his boat, the picture is wholly concerned with the old man's battle with the marlin and his struggle against sharks.
Director Sturges has tried to preserve the mystical sense of communion between the old man and his fish ("Fish, I love you, and I respect you very much"), and the simplicity of the old man's understanding of his triumph and defeat ("I went out too far"). Unfortunately, Actor Tracy apparently had other ideas. In most roles Tracy plays himself, but usually, out of deference to the part, he plays himself with a difference. This time he plays himself with indifference. Furthermore, on location he was never permitted to catch a marlin, and so the camera could never catch him at it. Result is that Director Sturges must cross-cut so interminably—fish, Tracy, fish, Tracy—that Old Man loses the lifelikeness, the excitement, and above all the generosity of rhythm that the theme requires.