by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie I’d stumbled
on in my backlog of DVD’s: The Deep, a 1977 production of Columbia Pictures in association with two
now-defunct record companies, EMI and Casablanca (the latter got that name from
the coincidence of its president being named Neil Bogart, though he was no
relation to the Casablanca star, and its biggest acts were Donna Summer and KISS). The Deep began life as a novel by Peter Benchley, who had
just had a huge success with his book Jaws — and with the film of Jaws finally surpassing Gone With the Wind as the highest-grossing movie of all time, it’s no
surprise that there was a fierce bidding war for the movie rights to The
Deep and the rights were won by
Peter Guber, who had just stepped down as Columbia studio head to become an
independent producer for the company. The Deep was conceived at the height of the hype
surrounding the “Bermuda Triangle,” the location in the Caribbean where an
unusually high number of ships had sunk and planes had crashed, and books were
written claiming there was some supernatural element involved (while other
books were written attempting to debunk those). Peter Benchley obviously had
that in mind when he set The Deep on and just off the coast of Bermuda, since the intrigue revolves
around the preposterous assumption that three ships sank just off Bermuda, two early 18th
century sailing vessels and a World War II submarine, and they all happened to
land just on top of each other underwater. A young American (we presume)
couple, David Sanders (Nick Nolte, five years after People magazine named him “The Sexiest Man Alive” and
with his looks still relatively intact) and Gail Berke (Jacqueline Bisset, who in
the opening scene is shown diving underwater wearing just a white T-shirt,
black swim trunks and SCUBA gear; the way the shirt clings to her while wet
made it clear she wasn’t wearing
a bra, and you could see so much of her nipples, her aureoles and the luscious
mounds of flesh connecting these to her body that posters of her that way
became iconic items on the dorm walls of young straight college boys the way
posters of Racquel Welch in her ultra-revealing prehistoric bikini in One
Million Years, B.C. had a decade earlier), are
diving for buried treasure off the Bermuda coast when they stumble on the three
conjoined wrecks: a Spanish flagship from 1714, a French freighter that sailed
with the Spanish fleet as part of what would later be called a convoy but which
itself sank a year later, and a World War II submarine. The French freighter
contained a special collection of jewels made for King Philip of Spain (which
one? The most famous one, Philip II, reigned in the late 1500’s and sent the
Spanish Armada to England) to impress Elizabeth Farnese, the Duchess of Parma,
whom he wanted to marry, but like the Maltese falcon the treasure never reached
Spain.
The sub has its own treasure: thousands of ampules of medical-grade
morphine which could easily be refined into pure heroin, and which is what the
drug cartel headed by Henri Cloche (Louis Gossett, Jr.) is after — though
they’re the sort of freewheeling criminal enterprise that will deal in anything as long as it will make them money and so they’re
attracted to the idea of Spanish gold even though all they will do with the
Duchess of Parma’s treasure is melt it down and sell it as ordinary gold,
pearls and whatnot. To recover the treasure and establish its provenance David
and Gail call on Romer Treece (Robert Shaw, whose presence in the cast as the
old-salt owner of a decaying but still serviceable boat brings this movie even
closer to Jaws), who’s written several
books on the sunken Spanish treasures around Bermuda and owns a copy of the
Havana Manifest, supposedly a listing of all the ships that sailed to and from
Spain in the era of the conquistadores. There are a lot of
things annoying about The Deep, among them the fact that though it was made in 1977 (and is therefore
older than Citizen Kane and Casablanca were when I first saw them) it seems like a modern
movie: O.K. action sequences and boring plot exposition scenes between them. It
doesn’t help that, even though Peter Benchley co-wrote the script with Tracy
Keenan Wynn, the plot really doesn’t make sense — we’re lurched around from
menace to menace with little or no provocation — and it also doesn’t help that
the director, Peter Yates, is a competent filmmaker but hardly in Steven
Spielberg’s league fur suspense or thrills. There are also nods to Benchley’s
previous success in the appearance of a giant white sea creature (we’re told
it’s an unusually large moray eel) that menaces the characters, or the attempt
of Cloche and his men (one really off-putting aspect of this film is its racism: all the good guys are
white and all the bad guys — except Adam Coffin [Eli Wallach], one of Treece’s
associates who sells him out — are Black) to kill Our Heroes by throwing bloody
meat into the water as chum to attract, you guessed it, sharks.
I remember
seeing it when it first came out at a press screening (I was working for a
magazine that ordinarily would have been too small to get free movie tickets,
but a major firm doing publicity for movies in San Francisco had its office and
its screening room in the same building as our office, so we got in) and
remembering nothing about it but how hot Jacqueline Bisset looked in her clingy
T-shirt underwater. Now I can see why: aside from some quite beautiful
underwater photography the film really has little or nothing to offer — it’s
not actively bad but it’s not very good either. Robert Shaw’s overacting has
been criticized, but a) after Jaws this was how audiences expected Shaw to act, especially in a story by Peter Benchley; and b) his
overacting at least helps to make up for the non-acting of Nolte and Bisset, who seem to be doing
nothing more than hurling their hot bods at the camera and letting their
physiques do their acting for them. It also doesn’t help that Nolte is
afflicted with one of those horrible pageboy haircuts and matching moustaches
that were all the rage in 1977, or that Bisset sometimes speaks in an American
accent, sometimes in a British one and sometimes in a mishmash of the two that
renders much of her dialogue virtually unintelligible. Add to that a DVD so old
it offered only a 4:3 pan-and-scan aspect ratio version of the film, and an
image quality so below what we expect from DVD’s of more recent films that
early on Charles was saying it looked like an archive.org download, and The
Deep emerges (or should I say
submerges?) as a viewing experience that isn’t exactly unpleasant (although the
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew could have had a blast with this film!) but isn’t all that
memorable or entertaining either.
