The Old Man and the Sea (1958)

I found this movie very true to the book. It contains detail of the old man -Santiago- going out to sea to catch the Marlin and his friend Manolin who is like his protector who watches over him which is very kind because he is just a young boy. It gives detail to his dreams about the lions to the church music when he is carrying the sail representing Christ carrying his cross to be crucified. Well for the time that it was made (1958) I found that "The Old Man and the Sea" had spectacular acting, setting, special effects, and dialogue. It makes you feel emotion towards the old man and what he wants which is the Marlin, but when the sharks come and eat it he feels devastated, he goes through so much pain and is without luck but manages to catch a great Marlin twice as long as the skiff he is in. He loses it all and when he returns home you really see have devastated he is but he has Manolin to help him out, and bring him coffee. I rate this movie a 8 out of 10 it was a wonderful movie you should watch if you ever get a chance. It teaches you in some ways that you should prepare instead of wait for luck. It is better to be prepared and when luck comes you are ready for it. Great movie really enjoyed it. -Kenneth Valdivia

The story begins, as you might expect, with an old man. He is a fisherman who has gone 84 days without catching a fish. We also meet a boy who is very close friends with the old man. The old man taught him to fish when he was young, and the boy brings the old man food. The old man is named Santiago and the close friend is Manalion. This old man goes to sleep dreaming of the lions he used to see back in the day in Africa. He wakes before sunrise and does what fishermen do, gets into his boat and heads out to fish in the sea. Not too long after that, the old man hooks a ridiculously big fish. it was a shark, a A marlin to be exact. Most of the novel consists of this struggle, which lasts over three days out inn the sea. It is a battle of strength and of wills. The old man sees the fish as his brother, not his enemy. Yet that does not stop him from killing the marlin.But this is no happy ending. It's just a happy mid-point followed by an extraordinarily sad ending. The old man straps the fish to the side of the boat and heads home. On the way, he is attacked by sharks, who slowly but surely eat away at the marlin while the old man, starving and exhausted, tries to beat them off with a harpoon, a club, and finally nothing but a simple knife. By the time he makes it back to shore, there is nothing left of the fish but a skeleton. Santiago later goes to sleep and dreams of the lions, dreams of his youth.I personally enjoyed this movie as well as the novel. I would recommend this movie to a dear friend.

Do you stay faithful to the book or do you adapt a work so that it presents itself as the best film? Always an issue and for this film the adaption kills the work it does not suit the cinema and feels like a plodding piece instead of the insightful tale of humanity that the novella was. The framing of shots is poor and the blurring of the frame to hide the low quality of the special effects should have been better done, I felt like I was seeing a film from the late 30's rather than nearing the sixties. You could place anyone into the role of the old man and come away with a decent performance and Tracey does not give us anything that one may consider amazing.

Spencer Tracy is Santiago, an old impoverished Cuban fisherman who has had eighty-four days of bad luck and is being helped to survive by a young boy of the village. Tracy takes his little fishing boat farther out than usual, lands a giant marlin after a fierce three-day struggle, and then loses his trophy to the sharks who tear the great fish to pieces, leaving only the head, spine, and tail.If it get off to something of a slow start, it nevertheless involves us in Tracy's fate all the way. There are lyrical interludes while Tracy watches the birds, the flying fish, the porpoises, and dreams of lions on the African shore. He follows the baseball in the newspapers and admires Joe DiMaggio.And the battles are monumental. Tracy has to fight the huge marlin, then the multitude of sharks that attack it, and -- constantly -- his own age and fatigue. The viewer gets to feel the desperation behind all of these contests. Tracy pulls it off with the help of Dmitri Tiomkin's somewhat bombastic score, with its echoes of "Rio Bravo" and "High Noon." There are three problems though. First, modern viewers have been spoiled by recent advances in special effects and process work. The marlin, seen up close, looks like the rubber bladder it is, even when disguised by the blurry image representing Tracy's dizziness. After it's been stripped by the sharks, the spine looks like a lead pipe bought at the local plumber's, with a few plastic ribs attached. The scenes of the marlin leaping out of the sea aren't well integrated with the studio footage.Second -- and let's face facts -- Big Ernie doesn't translate well to the screen. His bare-bones attempts at thought-provoking folk poetry come across as stilted and sometimes risible.Tracy (to himself): "Do not blame the hand. It is not the hand's fault." (To his cramped hand): "You have been a long time with the fish." Third, there is a problem with the casting. Harry Bellaver is a pug, or a cop, or a reporter in Hollywood movies. He is not a Cuban bartender; he is not strong and has no aficion. Most of all, there is a problem with Spencer Tracy, an actor whom I deeply admire. Even my crude Irish stepfather from Charlestown who never had a sensitive thought in his life, was once moved to say, "Y'know, he's a good-lookin' guy. I don't mean handsome, but manly." But Tracy is not a poor Cuban fisherman. Ernie himself said Tracy "looks like a fat, rich actor." He didn't care for the boy either, who looked like "a cross between a tadpole and Anita Loos." I'm certain I've read somewhere that Hemingway was among the spectators at the arm wrestling contest flashback but I'm not sure it's true.Despite these deficiencies, the author, the cast and crew pull it off. Hemingway had Hispanic fatalism down pat. In the face of what we would call bad luck, they become Stoics. That Olympian generalization isn't mine. A Latin American professor devoted an entire lecture to it. It's a moving and tragic story touching on Hemingway's familiar themes of pride and defeat. As Hemingway has the fisherman say, "You can destroy a man but you can not defeat him," to which I'm tempted to reply, "Like hell, you can't."