The Old Man and the Sea (1958)

Directed by John Sturges. Starring Spencer Tracy, Felipe Pazos Jr., Harry Bellaver.

By its nature, Ernest Hemingway’s fisherman fable doesn’t cry out for a cinematic interpretation, and this inordinately faithful rendering is frustratingly prosaic in depicting the book’s battle of wills and test of determination and manhood. The overuse of phony compositing and the banal shot selections, cutting back and forth between the old man and the marlin/sharks with which he struggles, fail to drum up interest in his salty sojourn. Hemingway’s spare, straightforward prose is mostly delivered as narration monologues, a strategy that works on the page far better than on the screen, and as a result, Tracy’s portrayal is adequate instead of compelling (before even getting around to how miscast he is as a Cuban). What vitality there is can be credited in large part to Dmitri Tiomkin’s Oscar-winning score, from the same year in which Bernard Herrmann’s work for Vertigo wasn’t even nominated.

50/100