Really Surprised!

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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.

I should first admit that I've never read Ernest Hemingway's novel. My interpretation of John Sturges's adaptation of "The Old Man and the Sea" is that the title character, a Cuban fisherman (Spencer Tracy), is making what appears to be his last attempt at greatness. Teased by everyone for his lack of catch over the past few months, the old man sets out with a well defined goal and does everything that he can to fulfill it. I guess that the movie, released in autumn 1958, also served as a last look at Cuba before the revolution (although a full history of the country requires a much more detailed explanation).Anyway, it's definitely worth seeing.

Ernest Hemingway's novella,The Old Man and the Sea was probably extremely difficult to film to begin with, but this didn't stop John Sturges from trying to put Hemingway's tight little character study into film.The Old Man and the Sea is a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy. The screenplay was adapted by Peter Viertel from the novella and the film was directed by Sturges.Spencer Tracy is the Old Man, a Cuban fisherman who tries to haul in a huge fish that he catches far from shore. Tracy's tiny boat is besieged by sharks and by natural elements, but the Old Man stubbornly sticks to his job. In the end, the fish is nothing more than a skeleton, and the Old Man returns to his tiny hovel. In this movie,Tracy did great great for himself as he was able to put to life a movie the features himself mostly with no other characters involved.I personally could say that he was born to play the old fisherman.As for the screenplay,the movie was a great adaptation of Hemingway's novella.The only negative thing I could say was that the film was very poor in its technical aspects as inconsistencies in very obvious all throughout many scenes.I could have given this movie a 10/10 rating if not for this.

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."