Remind me why I'm not an Ernest Hemingway fan again

Another recent movie watch was the Spencer Tracy version of The Old Man and the Sea.

I read the novella in either eighth- or ninth-grade English class (I don't remember which), so the story was already well known to me, as it probably is for a lot of you. Spencer Tracy plays the old man, since there isn't any way he's playing the sea. Tracy also serves as the narrator, reading what I presume is text straight from Hemingway's story. The old man is a Cuban fisherman who probably ought to retire if he had a family to support him in his dotage, but one assumes he doesn't. He's been going out every day, but for the last 84 days has failed to catch a fish.

He's got a friend in The Boy (Felipe Pazos Jr.) who used to go out on the boat with him, but hasn't in some while. The Boy helps with errands, but most of the story involves the old man out at sea alone. He sets up lines of varying length, the point I guess being that different types of fish are normally found at different depths. And then he waits, and waits...

Eventually he gets a bite on the deepest line, a fish that must be pretty strong because it's able to drag his boat farther out to sea. Eventually the old man sees the fish surface, and it's a huge marlin, bigger than his boat. No wonder he's had so much trouble hauling it in. In fact, the old man winds up fighting the fish for something like three days.

The old man does catch the fish, but it's too big to put on his boat, so he has to lash it to the side of his boat. However, he also had to harpoon it to kill it, and that means blood poured out into the ocean. You can probably guess what blood in the water means....

The Old Man and the Sea is a well-enough made movie, and Tracy gives a pretty good performance. But the movie has a pretty big problem with the source material, which is pretty sparse. The movie runs 86 minutes, but even at that it's slooooooow for substantial stretches as there's not much to do but wait for the old man to try to catch the fish. However, I'm glad I did finally get around to watching it.

Having been produced at Warner Bros., The Old Man and the Sea is unsurprisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.