cult film freak: PULP NOVEL 'HIS BONES ARE CORAL' BECOMES THE CHOPPY 'SHARK'

Title: SHARK Year: 1969 Rating: ***

Sometimes you run into a terrific pulp novel watching an old bad movie: In this case the Samuel Fuller sea noir SHARK came out in 1969 and starred a then mostly unknown Burt Reynolds as a drug runner, who actually mentions that he's only heard of that occupation, "drug runner," in the movies... His maverick, footloose, hunted character is used by a supposed father/daughter team to dive for gold in shark-infested waters. This was based on the book HIS BONES ARE CORAL by British author Victor Canning, and with a pulpy title like that, it was well worth finding after searching a few used bookstores...

Novel Published: 1954

With a terrific Hemingway TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT-style fishing boat rocking through stormy waters: Wherein the film begins with a choppily-edited shark attack, the book opens with a plane crash, and he soon meets a pretty girl who introduces him to her father, and, like the movie, is hired to captain a charter where dad can dive for gold in a location guarded by sharks. Our ragged lead winds up fighting for his life to win the girl, and to come out of the situation without getting stabbed by human goons...

Burt in Shark

The first-person narrative is pulpy, poetic, corny, lovely; the action flows and the dialogue is dreamy and yet tough and uncompromising at the same time. The only downside is the second half doesn't live up to the first, being that, like many dime novels of the crime nature, the born loser main character gets too weepy and whipped by the backstabbing dame... but no matter... CORAL was a fantastic read that wouldn't have been discovered by Cult Film Freak without that maligned Sam Fuller flick, ruined by studio henchman, which is not only difficult to understand in the dialogue department, taking place in Cairo where the actors seem like the real thing and thus, dubbed horribly. Even Americans like Arthur Kennedy (playing a Walter Brennan style rummy sidekick from the theatrical TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart) and Barry Sullivan rush through their lines: providing what feels like a film noir collage of sneaky conversations with brief bouts of jumbled action. Although, technically, if you center on individual shots, creative camera angles, and a few neatly-flowing non-cut performances by a genuinely cool Bogart-style Burt Reynolds, Mr. Fuller's poetic signature is visible, somewhat, within those murky, muddied waters.

Opening Credit Sequence Font... The "A" looks damn cool