OVP: Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953)

Film: Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953)
Stars: Robert Wagner, Terry Moore, Gilbert Roland, J. Carrol Naish, Peter Graves
Director: Robert D. Webb
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Oscar nominations for technical achievements are always a mixed bag...in fact, almost always when you're looking at a film that's more noted for technical achievements, it's a mixed bag.  Technology is always evolving, and unless you're there for the moment it starts to wow you, it's hard to comprehend what the world was like before it.  This is the case if you're coming across the 1953 adventure film Beneath the 12-Mile Reef for the first time.  The film, a big hit at the time but almost completely forgotten now, was one of the earliest examples of Cinemascope, a type of widescreen shooting process that was popular throughout the 1950's & 60's, and was the first such use of the style featuring scenes shot underwater.  Underwater shooting has since become something of a staple of not just in narrative movies, but also documentaries and especially television (think pretty much everything David Attenborough has ever done).  While it wasn't the first film to be shot underwater (movies had used this technique since the early 1940's), it was an extraordinary step-forward and one of the pioneers of the process, filmed three years before Jacques Cousteau's landmark The Silent World.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot of the film is relatively simple, and you'd be forgiven if you find it mildly hard to follow due to conflicts just sort of emerging without warning.  It centers on a father Mike (Roland) and son Tony (Wagner) team of Greek sponge hookers (yes, that is the term they used, and it's also my new favorite job title), who go deep-sea diving in hopes of finding sponges in Key West in the early 1950's (this is right before this became a largely dormant process because it was destroying local sponge populations & synthetic sponges made the practice completely unnecessary).  They quarrel with the locals, and exchange plenty of xenophobic insults, all-the-while Gwyneth (Moore), the lovely young daughter of one of the key local fishermen who keep trying to sabotage Mike & Tony's boat & livelihood, falls for Tony.  Mike dies in a freak fishing accident, and afterward the locals burn Mike's boat.  After this, there is something of an accord between the two fishing teams, Tony & Gwyneth randomly get married, and then Tony proves that he can handle the deep sea diving like his father, even on the forbidden 12-mile reef.

The movie itself is a snooze.  The central romance between Wagner & Moore is unbearably wooden.  I don't have a lot of experience with Robert Wagner as an actor (a lot of his success came in television in the 1970's and 80's, which is not my field of expertise), but if this is any indication, his stardom seemed to come from his intense beauty & startlingly modern physique than any actual acting talent.  He spends most of this movie shirtless, but his line deliveries are atrocious & the casual ethnic slurs being tossed around about Greeks in regard to Wagner feel particularly wrong considering the actor's ancestors hail from Norway & Germany.

The one calling card to this movie is its cinematography, which is impressive, at least underwater.  Cousteau went out into nature, but this appears to largely have been filmed on location so I'm not sure why it doesn't get similar credit to pioneering this technology, though obviously some of the underwater creatures aren't real.  Shot in color, the scenes underwater would have been considered riveting for the time.  Even compared to where this technology would go within a decade it feels hard to compare it to our modern-day advances, but for its time it was revolutionary stuff, and I get why this was celebrated even if the actual artistry of the cinematography is limited by the technology, and nothing above-ground is of much intrigue.  Thus, this is another movie that is easier to appreciate as a curiosity than on its actual merits, because while it was an advancement at its time, we don't have that lens now, and thus are just left with a crumby script & bad acting.