UNDER THE CARIBBEAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 935, 12 July 1957, Page 15

UNDER THE CARIBBEAN

(Hans Hass-1.F.D) G Cert. | ANS, Lotte and their company of skin-divers had barely dunked themselves in the pellucid waters of the Caribbean before I found myself scribbling sceptically on the pad strapped to the wristband of my gents’ natty foamrubber suiting. Quaere, I wrote (Aubreywise), Is Mr Hass _ being too clever by half? And it proved, as the film reeled off, a fair comment. Edmund Gosse has recorded, among the recollections of his life as a small boy at Oddicombe, that his consuming ambition was to walk out over the sea as far as he could, then lie flat.on it, face downwards, and peer into the depths. Now there is a touch of the small Gosse in most of us. For most of us the wonders of the deep are sufficient in themselves. The stone flowers of the coral gardens, slow-nourished through dim centuries, need no adventitious attractions, no tricks to capture our imagination. The drama of life and death in the seacaves scarcely requires a melodrama super-imposed upon it. Yet that is what Mr Hass appears to think we want. This is, in fact, a most exasperating film for the enthusiast. It is not presented as a straightforward account of exploration. It has a "story"-palpably phoney-which requires Lotte to take risks under water which, I’m certain, she would never dream of taking in actuality. There are a number of comic interludes-all of them rather contrived and not all of them excessively funny. The dialogue is sometimes laboriously didactic, and in the preparation of the English-language soundtrack little attention has been paid to matching words and lip-movements. But I found the photography delightful, and tremendously exciting at times -even when, in a climax which might have come from the Perils of Pauline, I knew jolly well that my leg was being pulled. Lotte Hass, of course, is cast as the star of the show and it’s not difficult to see why Hans devotes so much footage to her (like the Caribbean natives with whom the film-makers foregather, Hans, too, knows the magic words Money and Dollars). Admittedly, for his blonde Lorelei I'd almost go overboard myself — if she’d only keep at a respectful distance from hammerheads and _ tigersharks. To watch her swim languidly, hair floating like a bright cloud, through

groves of brain-corals and dead-men’s hands is to remember Odysseus and the sirens. Or it would be if Hans were not forever breaking in with snippets of useful information about Crinoids or Portuguese men o’ war. The facts rain down, much (one fears) as the detritus of marine life drifts down into the vacant abyss. It’s in the Pacific, off Cocos Island, that the film has its phoney climax, with Lotte pinned down by a pack of prowling tiger sharks and only half a minute’s air left. That may leave you laughing, but the sequence has a genuine climax,’ too, in which we get the first underwater glimpses of a sperm whale. These shots (nothing skimped about them) are tremendous in their impact and superbly done, The marine photo-graphy-in Technicolor-all the way through is good, but for the sight of that vast jaw opening before my eyes and the water boiling under the broad flukes I'd willingly put up with the melodrama all over again.

BAROMETER FAIR: "Under the Caribbean." MAINLY ws ia "The Ambassador’s Daughte "While the City Sleeps."’