Shark! (1969)
AKA Caine, Man-Eater
Starring Burt Reynolds, Arthur Kennedy, Silvia Pinal, Barry Sullivan, Enrique Lucero, Carlos Barry, Manuel Alvarado, José Chávez, Francisco Reiguera, Emilia Stuart, José Marco
Directed by Samuel Fuller
Expectations: The lowest.
Shark!, the film which Sam Fuller was so displeased with that he disowned it and tried to get the producers to remove his name from it. Around the fringes of the film, there are shreds of Fuller’s usual style and forceful direction, but overall it just doesn’t have that Fuller spark. Shark! is a great example of how editing can completely cripple a film, as Fuller delivered his final cut to the producers only to have it re-cut without his knowledge into the lifeless, slow film before us. Shark! feels disjointed, sloppy and without purpose for a good amount of its runtime, things that Fuller’s previous films just don’t set you up to expect from him.
In my review for The Naked Kiss, I mentioned that it was a film that could have never been made within the studio system. While this is impressive nowadays, the controversial nature of the film also made it nearly impossible for Fuller to get financing for his future films, so he spent a lot of his time after The Naked Kiss unsuccessfully trying to get pictures off the ground. Eventually, this led Fuller to get desperate and take the shady deal that led to the production of Shark! In between the two films, Fuller had made a few episodes of the TV show Iron Horse, but he found this work so boring and uninteresting that he could barely even remember doing it in his autobiography. This disinterest surely contributed to Fuller’s acceptance of the Shark! deal, which was originally a two-film contract that dissolved after the debacle of Shark!