Tiger Shark (1932)

Please don't spend money on this.

A Surprisingly Unforgettable Movie!

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

***SPOILERS*** Edward G. Robinson looking as well as talking like a Mexican Bandito then a Portuguese fisherman is "Mighty" Mike Mascarehas the greatest fisherman this side of the Pacific Ocean. Mike who earlier in the movie lost his left hand to a tiger shark who bit it off while he was knocked out trying to rescue his fishing partner Manuel "Manny" Silva, William Ricciardi, who was devoured by a school of sharks tailing his boat. Fully recovered with a hook for a hand, that comes in handy in scratching his back, Mike goes to see Manny's daughter Quita,Zita Johann, to tell hr the terrible news about her dad ending up as shark bait and never, in being lost at sea, to be seen again even at his own funeral! It's then that Cupid's arrow strikes Mike through the heart and he falls madly in love with the pretty Quita even though she tells him she's not in love with him. This doesn't seem to matter to Mike who feels that he can win over Quita's love after he marries her and shows her what a great fisherman, as well as lover, that he really is.Finally giving into Mike and marrying him it soon turns out that Mike's good friend, who saved Mike from bring eaten alive by sharks, All-American looking Pipes Boley,Richard "Dick" Arlen,gets Quita's attention and despite Pipes doing his best to avoid it the two fall in love with each other. It's later that Mike recovering from a drunken binge finds both Pipes and Quita in each other arms that he plans to do both lovers in before his next planned, with Quita joining in,fishing trip!****SPOILERS****Mad and drunk with revenge Mike attacks and knocks out Pipes and plans to feed him to the sharks with the crewmen on his boat locked up in their cabins helpless to do anything to save him. It just happens that Mike's leg got tangled in a rope and he ends up in the water with a bunch of hungry sharks about to have him for lunch. Pipes now recovered from the beating he got from Mike jumps into the shark infested water and rescues him only after he goes into shock and later dies of his injuries. It's in the last moments of his life that Mike finally realizes just what a jerk he was telling him and Quita how sorry he was for all the trouble he caused for them. A fitting ending for a man who never knew who his true friends were until he faced death straight in the eye and was saved by the very one -Pipes- he just moments before tried to murdered.

When Spencer Tracy played the Portugese fisherman in MGM's "Captains Courageous", he dealt with wags laughing at him for his Chico Marxx hairdo. Here, Edward G. Robinson has the same job and the same issue. If, unlike, Spencer Tracy, he didn't win an Oscar for his performance, he still rates an "A" for giving an excellent portrayal in an entertaining if sometimes over-the-top and gruesome melodrama.The story of Portugese fisherman Robinson starts when he is revealed to be one of three survivors of a capsized boat off the coast of Baja California in shark infested waters. Robinson immediately disposes of one of them into the briny sea after attempting to steal their water supply. The other sole survivor is young Richard Arlen who fights off the sharks right before one of them bites off Robinson's hand, leaving him an American version of Captain Hook. Robinson and Arlen become buddies and share many adventures together. Later, Robinson must visit young Zita Johann to tell her that her father was killed at sea, and ends up marrying her. But Arlen strikes her fancy in spite of her initial rejection of him, and when Robinson sees them in a romantic clinch, he plots revenge.Set on the Mexican Pacific coast for its fishing sequences and near San Diego for its dramatic story, "Tiger Shark" is an enjoyable mix of action and melodrama. Robinson provides a very layered performance as the rather ruthless fisherman who is loyal to his crew members but deadly to his foes. His final scene really sums up what is inside this character as he faces his own mortality. The film was remade several times by Warner Brothers, most notably as "Manpower" (1941), where Robinson played basically the same role, co-starring George Raft and Marlene Dietrich. That version switched the story from deep sea fishing to the world of men who repair electrical lines, and was used as a major plot device in the Warren Beatty gangster bio "Bugsy".

Edward G. Robinson plays a one handed fisherman making his living on the California coast. Even with a hook for a left hand he does pretty good in his line of work. But that steel hook isn't exactly quail bait.One of his crew is lost to the sharks during a voyage and he brings the news home to his daughter Zita Johann. She's back home after having run away from the fishing life and has had a pretty rough go of it.Though she doesn't love him, Johann marries Robinson and then another Robinson's crew, Richard Arlen comes in to complicate things.Other reviewers have mentioned the gazillion times Warner Brothers recycled the plot of Tiger Shark in other locales. But actually Robinson had done a version of They Knew What They Wanted back in 1930 entitled A Lady to Love. That's the real origin of this plot.The fishing boat scenes are realistically handled and the principal players do a good job. But this story has been told better and told better by Mr. Robinson himself.

All the old-time Hollywood studios recycled their scripts, turning previously-filmed properties into remakes and then re-remakes. More so than any other studio, Warner Brothers were notorious for re-re-re-remaking their previous films with only very slight changes in setting and dialogue. "Tiger Shark" is an historically significant film, as this movie provided the original template for a plot line which Warners recycled about two dozen times ... each time with just enough changes to fool the audience into thinking they were seeing an original plot. Except for stories which are in the public domain (such as Cinderella), "Tiger Shark" holds the all-time record for being re-made MORE OFTEN than any other movie ... each remake being "disguised" as a new movie.The basic plot is this: an older man with a physical handicap falls in love with an attractive young woman who owes him a favour. She marries him, more out of a sense of obligation than for love. Then she becomes attracted to a handsome young man who works alongside her handicapped husband. The young man returns her attraction, and they start having an affair. The husband discovers his wife's infidelity, and then (in the climax of the film) he and the younger man duke it out. That's the plot of "Tiger Shark", starring Edward G. Robinson, and it's also the plot of two dozen other Warners films which are uncredited remakes of "Tiger Shark".Compare this film to "Manpower" (1941), also starring Robinson. In "Tiger Shark" he plays a one-handed fisherman, with a hook at the end of his left arm. In "Manpower" he plays an electrical lineman with a limp. In both films, his love interest is a younger woman with a European accent: Zita Johann here, Marlene Dietrich in "Manpower". Robinson's younger rival in "Tiger Shark" (played by Richard Arlen) is basically the same character as Robinson's rival in "Manpower" (George Raft). The climax of "Tiger Shark" is a fight on the seashore; the climax of "Manpower" is a fistfight at the top of a telephone pole during a lightning storm. Once you allow for the change of setting, they're both the same film. I could make the same connections between "Tiger Shark" and about two dozen other Warners films, not all of them starring Robinson."Tiger Shark" benefits from some excellent direction by Howard Hawks. Richard Arlen is unfairly forgotten nowadays, but he was the closest thing Hollywood had to Harrison Ford before Harrison Ford came along. (I'm referring of course to the modern Harrison Ford, not the silent-film actor of the same name.) Arlen gives a good performance here. Zita Johann is excellent here, hampered only by her thick accent. She retired early from films to marry the producer John Houseman, long before Houseman became an Oscar-winning actor. Johann's most famous role is the female lead in "The Mummy" opposite Boris Karloff. When Johann published her autobiography in the 1980s, the publishers' promo material played up the fact that Johann had co-starred with Karloff, but they managed to avoid mentioning *which* Karloff film she'd been in: apparently they were afraid we would think that Zita Johann was a "scream queen" actress who only starred in horror films.I'll rate "Tiger Shark" 7 out of 10 on its own merits, or 9 points if you're an aspiring screenwriter who wants to study this film so you can learn how a single plot line can be reworked repeatedly.