The Old Man and the Sea

Spencer Tracy, despite his refusal to wear makeup, is once more trying to play the role of someone other than himself. In The Old Man and the Sea, Tracy emerges from his "late Cary Grant Period" of recent years, turns in one of Hollywood's few notable renderings of theatrical monologue, and does what he can for a generally unimpressive movie.

When the old man (Tracy) has fought the sea and the fish for three days and returns to his Cuban sea village, the narrator (also Tracy) tells those of us who can hear him that "the old man knew the depth of his tiredness." It is not difficult to see why Tracy is tired. His director, John Sturges, has insisted on everything, and allowed for nothing. He has Tracy running the gamut from the Hollywood equivalent of an El Grecian Christ figure, to the benign, twinkling-eyed mentor of an obnoxious little boy, who takes himself as seriously as the ambitious lead in an amateur Caucasian production of a Japanese morality play.

When Tracy is alone, and acting, he fills the screen quite well. The best spots in the movie, by far, are his beautiful conversations with the great fish. Tracy's clean handling of simple Hemingway humor mitigates the effect of some rather overspectacular camerawork, and his thoughtful poise while handling the fishing lines sustains a stretch of heavily philosophical narrative.

But much too often, Tracy cannot contend with his own garbled narrative; with Dmitri Tiomkin's musical score, which is alternately martial and ritualistic (and obtrusive enough to ruin the effect of at least two good scenes); and with Arthur Schmidt's film editing, which unfortunately is at its spliciest in the climactic battle between Tracy and the fish.

The screenplay for "Old Man" is too intent on preserving pristine Hemingwaysque to show any significant amount of cinematic imagination. The movie retains an excessive amount of the author's descriptive narrative, and at several points invites you to react as you would to a guided tour or a slide lecture. It also exaggerates Hemingway's literary use of African lioncubs in the old man's dreams, and confuses his visions of Africa with fishing flashbacks and highly ambiguous scenic shots. They may just as well have been filmed on a Cuban beach as in Africa, and the lions seem so visually irrelevent that including them in several crucial scenes of the movie only adds an unsuitable touch of thematic obscurity. All this, even with Tracy's first-rate performance, results in what Producer Leland Hayward admits to be a technically "sloppy" movie.

Of course, filming a heavily allegorical, one-character story is an ambitious undertaking. But with the realization that La Mar is "a woman who can give or withhold great favors" from the moviemaker as well as from the fisherman, and with less overall slavishness to Hemingway's manuscript, The Old Man and the Sea could have been one of Hollywood's all-too-few artistic successes.