TV Reviews : Hemingway Fish Story on NBC: This One Gets Away

Sunday is the day that NBC’s Jaws eat Hemingway.

The carnage comes in a new rendition of “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway’s slender novel about an old Cuban fisherman’s adventure alone at sea after going 84 days without a catch. After a grueling struggle, he manages to bring in a giant marlin and attach it to the side of his small boat, only to see it devoured by sharks on the way home.

The 1958 theatrical movie with Spencer Tracy showed just how difficult it is to film essentially a one-person story that is so internalized (old Santiago talks to himself and does a lot of thinking), and this Jud Taylor-directed version with Anthony Quinn is even less successful. It airs at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39. Roger O. Hirson’s script attempts to redress the problem by using flashbacks and creating characters--a young writer and his wife, plus Santiago’s daughter, who wants the old man with her in Havana--to periodically divert attention from the fisherman fighting for his catch and his life at sea.

The result is two competing movies in one, making this the worst adaptation of Hemingway since 1984, when NBC attached a homicidal heavy to its version of “The Sun Also Rises.”

Sunday’s best moments occur out there in the Gulf Stream with Santiago wilting under the burning sun, holding onto his rope line with cramped, bloodied hands and speaking to himself and the powerful fish that is towing him further and further to sea.

It is here where Santiago expresses the great hunter Hemingway’s curious belief that the way to give an animal respect is to stalk and destroy it. As Santiago says here to the marlin he intends to defeat: “I love and respect you very much, but before this day ends, I will kill you.”

Quinn is well cast and does nicely, but cannot rescue a story that sinks, ironically, on shore, where the fisherman who now labors at fishing is goofily paralleled by the writer (Gary Cole) who now labors at writing.

Apparently, this character is supposed to be a sort of writer’s-blocked Hemingway, gaining inspiration by following Santiago’s fish story from afar. He sits on the terrace, gloomily staring at the sea while engaging his wife in third-rate, clipped, Hemingwayesque dialogue. They drink. They sigh. They grimace. They walk. They talk. Sort of.

Her: “Why is it, do you think?”

Him: “Why is what?”

Exactly.

“God will give me a fish,” says Santiago, “a great fish.” This movie is a fish.