Wonderful Movie

One of my all time favorites.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

***SPOILERS*** Edward G. Robinson looking as well as talking like a Mexican Bandito then a Portuguese fisherman is "Mighty" Mike Mascarehas the greatest fisherman this side of the Pacific Ocean. Mike who earlier in the movie lost his left hand to a tiger shark who bit it off while he was knocked out trying to rescue his fishing partner Manuel "Manny" Silva, William Ricciardi, who was devoured by a school of sharks tailing his boat. Fully recovered with a hook for a hand, that comes in handy in scratching his back, Mike goes to see Manny's daughter Quita,Zita Johann, to tell hr the terrible news about her dad ending up as shark bait and never, in being lost at sea, to be seen again even at his own funeral! It's then that Cupid's arrow strikes Mike through the heart and he falls madly in love with the pretty Quita even though she tells him she's not in love with him. This doesn't seem to matter to Mike who feels that he can win over Quita's love after he marries her and shows her what a great fisherman, as well as lover, that he really is.Finally giving into Mike and marrying him it soon turns out that Mike's good friend, who saved Mike from bring eaten alive by sharks, All-American looking Pipes Boley,Richard "Dick" Arlen,gets Quita's attention and despite Pipes doing his best to avoid it the two fall in love with each other. It's later that Mike recovering from a drunken binge finds both Pipes and Quita in each other arms that he plans to do both lovers in before his next planned, with Quita joining in,fishing trip!****SPOILERS****Mad and drunk with revenge Mike attacks and knocks out Pipes and plans to feed him to the sharks with the crewmen on his boat locked up in their cabins helpless to do anything to save him. It just happens that Mike's leg got tangled in a rope and he ends up in the water with a bunch of hungry sharks about to have him for lunch. Pipes now recovered from the beating he got from Mike jumps into the shark infested water and rescues him only after he goes into shock and later dies of his injuries. It's in the last moments of his life that Mike finally realizes just what a jerk he was telling him and Quita how sorry he was for all the trouble he caused for them. A fitting ending for a man who never knew who his true friends were until he faced death straight in the eye and was saved by the very one -Pipes- he just moments before tried to murdered.

Those of us who read the entire book "Moby Dick" will remember interminable scenes devoted to descriptions of whale hunting and harvesting. That's how "Tiger Shark" seems: lots of extended scenes of tuna fishing and processing the catch. It really does serve to set a mood, and of course it juxtaposes the everyday life of a fisherman with the out-of-the-ordinary plot. And anyone with an interest can see how tuna fishing was actually performed in the Thirties. Big deal.For me, the movie started dragging from the git-go. I found Edward G. Robinson's unconvincing Portuguese patois boring from the first line, and his mother-lode of innocent jibber-jabber seemed grafted artificially onto the Robinson persona while never actually gelling. (John Wayne had a more successful outing with an accent when he played a Swede in an early film.) Then this Pipes-Quita romance comes along. Comes from out of nowhere. Suddenly she's in love. PUH-leese. A little poetic motivation might help things.Add the sappy ending. Yep, a solid "3".

This film is essentially the same movie that was remade MANY times in the 1930s and 40s. While the setting has changed, the essential plot elements were used again and again in such films as MANPOWER (1941) and DANGER LIGHTS (1930). For a really good discussion of this, try reading the review by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre ([email protected]). While he says that TIGER SHARK was the first of these types of films and I think it the earlier film DANGER LIGHTS (and perhaps some even earlier ones), his analysis of the genre is very insightful and so I don't want to just rehash what he wrote.The movie seems in the 21st century to be a very predictable relic and nothing more. While it is mildly entertaining, the plot itself just seems silly and over-the-top in many ways--especially in how it portrays tiger sharks as the impossible to stop killing machines! As far as the acting goes, it's a one man show--with Edward G. Robinson dominating all the scenes as a Portuguese-born fisherman. At times this portrayal is pretty good but at other times the character just seemed histrionic and overplayed. Robinson fans certainly won't remember this as one of his better films.My advice is if you are a huge fan of Warner Brothers or Edward G. Robinson films, certainly you should watch this movie. Otherwise, it's very skip-able and one that might provide a few unintended laughs.

Edward G. Robinson plays a one handed fisherman making his living on the California coast. Even with a hook for a left hand he does pretty good in his line of work. But that steel hook isn't exactly quail bait.One of his crew is lost to the sharks during a voyage and he brings the news home to his daughter Zita Johann. She's back home after having run away from the fishing life and has had a pretty rough go of it.Though she doesn't love him, Johann marries Robinson and then another Robinson's crew, Richard Arlen comes in to complicate things.Other reviewers have mentioned the gazillion times Warner Brothers recycled the plot of Tiger Shark in other locales. But actually Robinson had done a version of They Knew What They Wanted back in 1930 entitled A Lady to Love. That's the real origin of this plot.The fishing boat scenes are realistically handled and the principal players do a good job. But this story has been told better and told better by Mr. Robinson himself.