Ticket 2 Ride

This is quite a film. No, it’s not a film classic, but it has an interesting history. I’m wondering what the film Samuel Fuller envisioned before he left the production and later asked to have his name removed from it. That’s a mouthful!

Fuller was a successful writer/director of hardboiled dramas of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He was a bit down on his luck when this film story came along. He paid the bills by working in television and writing.

Fuller adapted the story from the book His Bones Are Coral by Victor Canning. Fuller was calling the film, Caine!, but the producers couldn’t resist making it about sharks after the stuntman was killed by one. It was also shown as Man-eater! Classy. This was years before Peter Benchley wrote Jaws and The Deep.

The film was based on a book about secretly retrieving gold from sudden boat off the coast of Sudan. Actually filmed in Mexico, Shark! had reported budget of $300,000.

The film opens with a stuntman killed by shark that got through protective netting. Producers used the tragedy in promoting the film. Fuller quit. The producers use the same shark attack footage at the end of the film where Caine and the professor ware attacked, though edited with close-up of the actors.

Shark! Plays like a B-film version of a Humphrey Bogart film. There is an exotic locale,l, treasure, a stranded American, corrupt cops, questionable characters, double crosses, and a love interest. That’s pretty much the story. Everyone smokes and drinks in the film, and needs a bath.

The supporting cast is interesting. Barry Sullivan, Silvia Pinal and Arthur Kennedy. They were all slumming. Kennedy had an award-winning career, but you wouldn’t know it here. He plays a drunkard who happens to be a doctor. Sullivan had a nice film and television career as a supporting actor. He plays a professor who is researching a wreck, but really needs help to retrieve gold from the wreck. Pinal was a leading Mexican actress, who also had a lot of success in Europe. Here, she plays mysterious and sexy, and is the brains of the gold recovery.

Filmed in 1967, released two years later. Burt Reynolds was trying to make the jump to feature films. He’s Caine, jovial, nice, but shady guy with bad luck, looking for an angle. He is a failed gunrunner, but he’s sharp enough to figure out what the professor is really up to.

Reynolds filmed his own action scenes and stunts: fights, rolling down a hill and generally any physical action required.

The overall production values are as one would expect of a B-film. Even the soundtrack music has little to do with the film. It’s a generic sultry, jazzy score which doesn’t follow the action or emotion. It could have been from a 1970s porno film.

Fuller uses a lot of extreme close-ups and high-angle shots. Too many in my opinion. He was a much better director than this film shows. Fuller usually worked with first-rate cinematographer. On this film, Raúl Martínez Solares, handled it. Solares had more than 200 credits in the Mexican cinema, this film was at the end of his career. The action scenes seem a bit amateurish, which makes me wonder how much of the film Fuller actually shot. The chase scene at the beginning of the film used an under-cranked camera so the action appears faster than normal; not quite Benny Hill, but close.

Fuller makes Caine affable, but with a streak of larceny. He watches over a young boy who is a thief, which shows his heart of gold. Everyone gets what they have coming in the film and the sharks get several meals.

This film is a curiosity for a couple of reasons. The most obvious is it’s star, Burt Reynolds, who a few years later was the top box office star in the world. He didn’t think much of this film.

As a Samuel Fuller film it was a disappointment. It sometimes how’s his wit and weariness, but often looks like it was shot on the backlot in between other films.

The stuntman’s death seemed more of a promotional opportunity than the tragedy it was. This film didn’t start the trend of monsters or aliens, but it was a precursor of the shark films, and rode that wave after Jaws.

As I said, this film is more a curiosity than a need to see it. I never had seen it before and was able to obtain a copy through the intra-library loan program. If you want to see a young Burt Reynolds doing what Burt did best, it’s on 90 minutes of your life.