morrison-dylan-fan Finding the RKO Adventure Comedy The Tuttles of Tahiti to be far better than expected,I started hoping that the BBC would show other similar films. Taking a look at BBC iPlayer listings,I was pleased to see an RKO sea life adventure epic,which led to me jumping in the ocean with Jane Russell.The plot:Splashing their cash to go on a boat to go in search for sunken treasure in the Caribbean,Johnny and his friend Dominic take their partners Theresa and Gloria along,with priest Father Cannon joining them at the last moment. Diving under the sea, Dominic and Johnny are thrilled to find a ship wreck which appears to contain priceless items. Coming back up from the ocean,Johnny and Dominic discover that a both filled with shady locals have taken an interest in their activities.View on the film: Going under the sea in scuba gear wearing a sexy figure-hugging red dress, Jane Russell gives a charismatic performance for her final RKO production,with Russell hitting the cheerful Adventure targets that the movie aims for. Stuck with re-writing the original screenplay by Hugh King & Robert B. Bailey,writer Walter Newman layers a new plot outline in extended narration sequences played over the scuba diving,which despite taking place during a "wet" activity,come off as rather dry.Breaking the waves above land,Newman gives the group a neat Adventure tale,which rides on light comedic flirting and a slick desire between Johnny and Dominic to explore the depths of the deep blue sea,which is disappointingly pulled down by the plodding added narration. Losing a huge amount of footage and cameras left in a barge and shooting during the storm seasons,director John Sturges and cinematographer Harry J. Wild are impressively still able to set sail for an enjoyable Adventure. Taking place a good amount of time under water,Sturges and Wild give the scuba diving an impressive crisp atmosphere,where smooth side shots allow the viewer to clearly see the cast underwater and also to spot the shiny treasure in the underwater world.

James Hitchcock Johnny Gray, his wife Teresa, his friend Dominic Quesada and Dominic's girlfriend Gloria (who just happens to own a boat) are on a diving expedition off the coast of Cuba, searching for sunken treasure. (Teresa is supposed to be Cuban, and some of her dialogue is in Spanish, but Jane Russell does not attempt a foreign accent in her English-language dialogue). In particular, they have dreams of finding a 17th century ship containing a life size solid gold Madonna with precious jewels. They realise, however, that even after they have found the wreck, they will have to face many perils before they can recover the treasure. They also discover that they face competition from a group of local shark fisherman who are suspicious about their activities and who refuse to be fobbed off with their story that they are merely geologists collecting samples. The film was directed by John Sturges, a director whose work could vary in quality but who at his best was responsible for some of the great classics of the fifties and sixties such as "Bad Day at Black Rock", "Gunfight at the OK Corral" and "The Great Escape". "Underwater!" is not really in the same class as any of those great films. One of its main weaknesses is the casting of Richard Egan, a rather stiff actor more notable for his impressive physique than for his acting talents, in the leading role of Johnny. As Johnny is a complex character, not a mere action hero, the film would have been better with a stronger actor in this part. The rest of the cast are rather better, although I suspect that a lot of the film's appeal, at least for male viewers, was the chance to see Jane Russell showing off her own equally impressive physique in a swimsuit. Overall, however, "Underwater!" holds up pretty well today. On one level it is an exciting adventure story, in which the treasure-hunters have to battle sharks, moray eels and other underwater dangers. (In this respect it is far superior to something like "The Deep" which attempted to tell a roughly similar story some two decades later). A film shot underwater must have been something new and original in 1955; these scenes were not actually shot under the sea but in a specially constructed tank. On another level, however, it is a parable along the lines of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" about what gold can do to men's souls, although it does not have quite the dramatic power of John Huston's masterpiece and lacks its tragic ending. Johnny becomes obsessed with the quest for the statue to such an extent that he is quite prepared to sacrifice his own life, or the lives of his companions, to find it. In the conflict with the fishermen it is Johnny who is the aggressor. It is notable that the cast includes a Catholic priest who acts as a sort of moral compass for the rest. These two layers of meaning help to keep the film watchable nearly sixty years after it was made. A bonus is the attractive musical score based around the popular hit tune "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White". 6/10

sol **MINOR SPOILERS** Midly entertaining sunken treasure adventure movie that's only kept afloat by it's star Jane Russell, Theresa Gray, who's constantly competing in the movie with the breath-taking Caribbean scenery off the coast of Cuba. Finding some underwater artifacts that suggest their from a Spanish Man of War it's decided by the sunken-ship treasure hunters Johnny & Dom, Richard Egan & Gilbert Roland, to get a bigger boat to go back out at sea to recover the hundreds of gold bars and box-loads of priceless gems submerged there.It takes a while for Johnny to first get his wife Thereas to go along with his, what seemed to her, water logged plan. It's then that Lady Luck struck him and Dom when looking to rent a 50 foot boat from this guy Robinson they finds that he checked out of town and left his boat over to his totally land-locked minded young secretary Gloria, Lori Nelson, who's more then willing to let the two treasure hunters use it.There's a number of unexpected event happen to the quintet with a local padre Father Cannon ,Robert Keith, coming on board who's only interested in recovering a life size solid gold Virgin Mary statue studded with diamonds to be returned to her rightful owners in the little church in Panama where she originally came from. Later there's this boat-load of shark hunters headed by the scuzzy-looking Rico, Joseph Caileia,looking for garbage from John's boat to use as bait to attract the underwater predators. Rico smells a rat, or a gold bar, when John tells him he and Dom are only looking for underwater rocks to be studied by the professors and students at Havana University.The movie "Underwater" comes to it's very predictable conclusion when after reaching the underwater sunken treasure site Johnny is left by himself with Dom suffering from the bends. It's then when we finally get to see Theresa or actress Jane Russell, who we earlier briefly saw in a swimsuit, put on her bathing suit and dive underwater to help and possible save her husband, Johnny, from either drowning or getting eaten up by sharks. Theresa for all her efforts gets stuck in the sunken ships wreckage where we then have Johnny making it back to the boat to get her an extra oxygen tank. You wonder why all this was really necessary when Theresa has those two giant natural air supply tanks that can easily keep Theresa breathing for at least a week! With Johnny and Theresa as well as Dom who heroically came to both their aid, risking his life doing it, back on the boat their again confronted by the shark-hunters who were disarmed and left on shore by Johnny & Dom just a while earlier. We then have another boring battle between them and Johnny & Dom which ends with everybody shaking hands and becoming friends> This happens when one of the shark hunters got very religious, which quickly affected the rest of his crew-mates, over the the fact that all this violence was over a golden statue of the Virgin Mary the mother of the Prince of Peace!Nothing that you wouldn't expect or want in a movie like "Underwater", except hoping to see a lot more of Jane Russell in a tight swimsuit, with a happy ending without anyone in the film getting killed. With the most seriously injury among the cast being that they got a bit wet under and between the ears and,in the case of Dom, a very bad case of the Caribbean cramps.

jotix100 Howard Hughes was a producer that had a lot of talent for discovering beautiful women that went on to have better careers with other vehicles than the ones he decided to create for them. That seems to be the case of this John Sturges' 1955 film "Underwater!" in which the curvaceous Jane Russell starred for the last time for Howard Hughes.The film is a curious one. We are introduced to Johnny and Dominic, two underwater divers who are searching for those sunken ships in the Caribbean, especially this one, not too far from Cuba. As they stumble into the old Spanish galleon, they find a man that appears to be a sort of pirate awaiting for them because it's obvious they are after those treasures.As Johnny and Dominic go back to Cuba, we are introduced to Theresa, Johnny's wife, who is dead set against spending money chasing his dreams. But when Dominic meets Gloria, by chance, she tells him about the yacht she has been left with by a departing old flame. So the four friends, and a priest who knows about those sunk ships, go in search of the riches trapped underwater.The film doesn't bring anything new to this film genre. In fact, it's pretty tame stuff we see in a predictable story we know how it will end. The best reward for the viewers of "Underwater" is the beautiful Jane Russell at her best. She was one of the sultriest women working in films during those days. The problem is the male stars who give by the numbers performances. Joseph Calleia is the only one that shows any spunk as the man who wants the riches from under the sea.