Years before Jaws, this fly-on-the-wall documentary told us about the hunt for a shark of the “Great White” variety. It told us about a sea-faring adventure with people who may or may not be crazy. It made us smell ocean brine and sweat. It baked us under a hot sun. It put us in a place where most of us will never be, which is on a wooden boat off the west coast of Africa (and later Australia) with a dead whale hanging off the side–its raw meat and blood used as shark bait–and on the hunt for a dangerous creature that’s happy to eat any living thing in its path because that’s exactly what Mother Nature always whispers into its ear.
Before this movie, there was no film documentation of an actual great white. It was an animal known to exist, but even many experts in all things aquatic had never actually SEEN one and what it could do. That’s where oceanographer Peter Gimbel steps in to GET that footage. Great white sightings were rare at the time, but he was determined. He had a boat, he had a crew, he had a folk singer (?), and he had some bulky, awkward 1970 film-loaded movie cameras to lug everywhere. He HAD to find one of these monsters or all of this expensive film he was shooting was gonna be worth about fifteen cents.
And Gimbel was willing to risk his life to do it. I’m sure that the money was on his mind, but when I watch this film, I really think that he did it for science. I think he got truly obsessed. I think he was on a real mission. I think that he didn’t think about anything else for a long time (the hunt took about eight months).
You can see it in the moment where a stoic Gimbel says that that the images that they were getting from the safety of their underwater cages weren’t good enough. Without fear or reservation–he’s very calm–Gimbel insists that he needs to swim among the sharks. Get out of the cage. Get real close. Nobody was going to talk him out of it. He was in that state of mind in which a shark bite would be worth it to get what he wanted.
And so he did it.
And he lived. And the movie came out and it’s good stuff.
What makes it worthwhile is that is not merely a “shark documentary”. It’s a movie about people on an extraordinary mission. No one here lectures to you. You’re just hanging out with them. You’re part of the team.
Pretty much everyone you see on camera also did behind-the-scenes jobs. Even goofball folk singer Tom Chapin, whose music gets aired out a few times here, is credited with camera work. We’re not watching a boat crew shot by a seperate film crew. We’re watching a group of people film themselves. The film is part of their mission.
Also, if you’re a fan of Jaws, Steven Spielberg almost doubtlessly took visual pointers from this film and maybe took inspiration from its vivid scene-setting. It might have challenged him to give us a world that you can smell and taste.
After all, both films have the same idea. Sharks are some wild shit, but the people who seek to learn about them and track them down are even more interesting.
The husband and wife team of Ron and Valerie Taylor, photographers and onscreen personalities here, went on to a Hollywood career from this. They shot underwater footage for damn near every major film for the next twenty-five years that wanted the job done right. They worked on everything from Jaws to The Blue Lagoon to Gallipoli to Honeymoon in Vegas!