Review: Underwater – 1955

"Scuba" films became popular in the 1950's with feature films using high quality widescreen underwater photography for the first time. Films like Beneath the 12 Mile Reef and Creature from the Black Lagoon used these innovations and gave back great box office earnings to their studios. Combining the visually exotic undersea world of fish, coral, and shipwrecks with Jane Russell and Richard Egan in Underwater must have seemed like a certain path to ticket-selling success, but it didn't turn out that way. Originally budgeted at $300K, producer Howard Hughes poured somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million into the film, far more than the $1.5 million spent for 20th Century Fox's Beneath the 12 Mile Reef and the $650K Universal put into Creature, but after Underwater premiered on February 9, 1955, the eventual earnings were around $2.2 million (compared to the $7.1 million Beneath made, and the $3 million+ Creature did.)

So what went wrong? Despite the excellent photography, there's a claustrophobic visual world in Underwater because it wasn't filmed in the Caribbean, where the story takes place, but in Hawaii. The scenes located topside aboard the treasure-hunter's boat where we see a lot of the action taking place doesn't include camera angles showing us the immense size of the ocean surrounding us, nor the details of the nearby shoreline, presumably because it would too obviously be Hawaii. Most of the up-close "exoticness" of the Caribbean story is from studio sets at RKO back in Los Angeles (hand-painted skies on a studio wall become obvious for some scenes when Underwater is watched in HD on a large screen). The large yacht the cast uses in the story is a beautiful boat, and in general everything visual is first rate as a movie set, but the camera work from director John Sturges doesn't explore this world above the water with any particular interest. Undersea, though, is a different story.

This "turkey" (as Jane Russell later called the movie) is about two main things, and this duality is a kind of schism that leans one way toward director Sturges and the other way toward producer Howard Hughes. Sturges works the story as a high-pressure tale of a team of people looking to bring up to the surface underwater booty they find aboard a wrecked Spanish ship that sits beneath the water on the precipice of a deep underwater trench (a premise borrowed by a number of later films in the "scuba" genre). Richard Egan and Gilbert Roland are the two main divers, and the plot works its magic to include Lori Nelson (who plays the nominal owner of the yacht the boys need for treasure hunting) and Jane Russell as Egan's character's wife who has to be convinced to sink money into the venture.

This static cast of treasure-seekers (Gilbert Roland, Jane Russell, Richard Egan, Lori Nelson and added later, Robert Keith) and a menacing scavenger boat of shark-hunters (led by Joseph Calleia) gives us a rather small number of characters to watch, and the shark-killers barely get any dialogue at all. These sea poachers are interested in what exactly the treasure seekers are up to, and this interaction steadily narrows the story and Underwater begins to suffer the way films with a gimmick suffer, that is, the story starts to cycle through itself and keeps repeating the trigger for the gimmick, and in this case that gimmick is Howard Hughes' obvious focus on getting Jane Russell into a swimsuit and into the water. Her character isn't shoe-horned into the story, but rather, the completely logical reasons for her to appear under the waves in her swimsuit and swimming around becomes a substitute for story development, and the tale just doesn't gel past its initial setup. The dry predictability that results from this simple storyline might have a multi-million dollar production budget, but it may as well be a low-end B movie script.

A few other irritants mar Underwater, such as the smooth-chested underwater stunt man for Gilbert Roland obviously not being the hairy-chested Roland. In some scenes we've got Roland and his heavily-forested naked chest, and then confusingly he's sans hair tussling with mishaps as the sunken Spanish ship begins to collapse inward upon itself. A simple "chest-wig" was apparently needed to not seed confusion for the audience (on my first view of the film, I said "Who's that guy?" Then I realized it was supposed to be Gilbert Roland – and obviously wasn't. Didn't Underwater have a continuity checker?)

Special effects in the film are generally quite good, but the model for the sunken underwater Spanish ship looks, well, like a model, and the size of the air bubbles coming off the craft indicate the scale for the model is horribly (or hilariously) way off, as if the cast is trying to ransack an aquarium toy. But the underwater insides of the sunken ship are a highly-detailed series of chambers and passageways, well done and interesting. As the divers regularly navigate this watery maze, deal with sharks, and other troubles, Underwater has some of its best moments.

The story doesn't provide that much help for building suspension of belief. As the cast tries to fend off the inquisitive shark-hunters regularly checking on their boat, our heroes keep claiming they're only researching geological formations on the ocean floor, that is, as they say repeatedly, "we're looking for rocks." The story never gives the characters the slightest action of actually bringing up any rocks to lay out as camouflage for their cover story, instead it is as if the cast is taunting the shark-hunters, which could have been a nice twist in the psychology between the two groups and a place to create tension, but instead all of this verbal interaction plays out as sloppy storytelling.

The undersea photography in Underwater is first rate. Seeing Egan and Russell swimming around, graceful humans in a world of liquid, often gliding along like flying beings, is extraordinary. The cast tries to make these characters move around, whether above or below the waves, like there is a stressful task at hand and the adventure of sunken treasure is a risky business, promising spectacular, lucrative results, but also fatal consequences for mistakes. Underwater sometimes hits these markers, but overall one wishes Hughes would have let Russell have more snarky dialogue even at the expense of fewer swimwear reveals. Poor Lori Nelson fades away though she starts off as a significant (and needed) counter-balance to Russell, and Gilbert Roland could have certainly pepped up the adventure (and humor) of the tale if given more space. But, nope.

Underwater starts off like a feature movie but then constricts itself like a scuba tank running out of air, until we're supposed to only be fascinated by Jane Russell with flippers on, paddling around in her red swimsuit. She's a beautiful woman and Underwater obviously had a lot of money thrown at it for production values, but that just doesn't make for a complete movie.

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Original page August 21, 2026