The Burt Reynolds shark thriller that pre-empted ‘Jaws’
Less than a decade before a young Steven Spielberg changed the film industry forever with 1975’s Jaws, Burt Reynolds starred in a thriller about sharks that took the media by storm. It wasn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. It was a B-movie through and through, a poorly acted, poorly dubbed, and often nonsensical exploitation flick, but it also beat Jaws in one major way: the sharks were real and on full display.
Reynolds was early in his career when the film came out. He’d become a familiar face with the television show Gunsmoke but had yet to hit the big time as a movie star with Deliverance. He was appearing in a string of low-budget genre movies, most of which were pretty forgettable. The shark was called Shark!, a title with absolutely zero chill that got the point across loud and clear. Reynolds starred as Caine, a gunrunner in Sudan who falls for an enigmatic Westerner (Silvia Pinal) who coerces him into diving into shark-infested waters to find treasure in a shipwreck.
It was directed (and later disowned) by Samuel Fuller, a pulp fiction novelist-turned B-movie director who had yet to make his masterpiece, The Big Red One. He would go on to be one of the most revered filmmakers for a host of young auteurs, but at this stage, he was still toiling away from job to job. Many of his previous films were deeply rooted in film noir and melodrama, and Shark! was no different.
In a post-Jaws world, it’s strange to see a film about the ocean’s apex predator that is anything other than pure action and suspense. Fuller’s film is much more of a film noir, featuring a disillusioned, morally ambiguous protagonist who is preyed upon by a glamorous femme fatale.
The sharks were the draw, though. Filmed in Mexico, the movie features long underwater sequences in which divers are chased by real sharks. Editing and perspective play a large role in making these scenes appear violent, but they are pretty impressive for the 1960s. Knowing that this was the key selling point of the movie, the producers got to work marketing the hell out of it.
They decided to spread the word that a stuntman named José Marco had been brutally attacked and killed by a great white while shooting a scene. Life magazine even did a two-page spread on the incident titled ‘Shark Kills a Man.’ It became the central marketing piece of the film, and when one of the producers took over Fuller’s edit, he added a dedication following the opening scene in which a diver is attacked and killed: “This film is dedicated to the fearless stuntmen who repeatedly risked their lives against attacks in shark-infested waters during the filming of this picture.”
No one had actually been killed. When a diving magazine investigated the story, it found no evidence to corroborate the claims, and Life issued a statement saying that “it may, it turns out, have been a hoax.” Still, the producers were damned if they were going to let a marketing opportunity pass them by. Six years later, when Jaw hit the big screen and became the highest-grossing movie of all time, Shark! got a re-release under the title Man-Eater. With Jaws as the new benchmark for what a shark movie could be, the 1969 film was panned by the handful of critics who saw it and ignored by audiences.
