He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream, and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. But now the Old Man1 (Spencer Tracy) finally has the big one on the line. It drags his skiff around for two days but he finally lands it. Then sharks come and eat his fish. That’s the movie. How is that a movie?
Well, here’s this movie’s superpower: it’s basically is an audiobook. Tracy’s mellifluous voice feeds us Ernest Hemingway’s terse, beautiful prose over Planet Earth visuals. Tracy delivering lines like “it is better to be lucky but I would rather be exact” or “the thousand times he had proved it meant nothing [because] now he was proving it again” is a vibe. And Tracy is an A-list megastar who handles the long scenes alone in the boat like Hanks in Cast Away or Bullock in Gravity.2
And then there’s the message of the movie. This Old Man lands the biggest fish anyone in Havana has ever seen but gets nothing for it because he can’t protect it from sharks. The townspeople respect the Old Man for his catch, but he doesn’t rest on his laurels: instead, he plans to heal up and get back on the water, since what he is is a fisherman.
Rating: 7/10, huntin’, fishin’, lovin’ everyday.
Cast and Crew
We last saw Spencer Tracy in the neo-Western Bad Day at Black Rock, but this film is a better match for his age and sensibilities. Between the two films, Tracy did his eighth flick with Katharine Hepburn, this one called Desk Set (1957). It had a screenplay from married writers Henry and Phoebe Ephron—and if that surname looks familiar, it’s because their daughter is chick-flick legend Nora Ephron.
The Trivia, Part I
For East of Eden, we did a rundown of the works of 20th Century American Literary Giant and 1962 Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck. Today we’ll do a rundown of 20th Century American Literary Giant and 1954 Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway. Don’t worry, we’ll do something more fun [sic] in the next part of the newsletter.
Hemingway is tied to many places. He wrote for the Kansas City Star; volunteered as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross in Italy during World War I; lived in Paris as part of the Lost Generation3; was a war correspondent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War; lived in Key West4; famously fished in Havana (hence the setting for “The Old Man and the Sea”; and committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.
Let’s talk the Big Three Hemingway novels.5
“The Sun Also Rises” (1926): Jake Barnes, dealing with despondency and impotence after WWI, travels from Paris to Spain for the running of the bulls. He ends up in a love triangle with Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn. The novel’s title is from Ecclesiastes.6
“A Farewell to Arms” (1929): about an American serving in the Ambulance Corps in Italy during WWI (sound familiar?) who falls in love with nurse Catherine Barkley. He keeps his corporeal arms but flees the war to Switzerland. Oh, and then Catherine dies. The title’s from a poem by George Peele.
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940): about American Robert Jordan fighting the Spanish Civil War with a group of guerillas. It gets its name from a John Donne poem and lent that name to a Metallica song.
Other Hemingway works: for nonfiction, you should know “Death in the Afternoon” (1932), which digs deep into bullfighting, and “Green Hills of Africa” (1935), about a safari Hemingway took with his second wife. His short stories that come up the most are “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”7
Hemingway, an excellent lover but terrible husband, had four wives. Those wives were Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn8, and Mary Welsh. He’s also got two famous grandchildren: actress Mariel Hemingway and supermodel Margaux Hemingway.
Look, I didn’t make the decision that we collectively care this much about Ernest Hemingway but don’t know bupkis about, like, Ford Madox Ford or whatever.9
The Trivia, Part II
Before the Old Man leaves on his journey, Manolin, the boy who takes care of him, asks who the greatest baseball manager is. The Old Man’s response is a good one: “I think they are all equal.”10 They’re not all equal in terms of trivia-worthiness, though, so let’s talk the old-timey managers you’ve gotta know. (Yeah, the “fun” part of this newsletter is old-timey baseball. Sorry.)
Manolin first asks to hear about “the great John J. McGraw.” McGraw, nicknamed “Little Napoleon,” was the manager of the New York Giants from 1902 to 1932 and won three World Series. Connie Mack (the manager on deck) assessed McGraw thusly: “There has only been one manager—and his name is McGraw.”
But Connie Mack11 has McGraw beat in about every category. Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 years (1901-1950), got five World Series titles, and still holds the record for most career wins—and losses—as a manager.12
Casey Stengel, the “Old Perfessor,” managed the New York Yankees (with great success, playing in ten World Series) and the expansion New York Mets (with terrible failure, going 175-404). From 1949-1960, it’s easier to just talk about the years the Yankees didn’t win the pennant (1954 and 1959) than go through the years they did.13
Leo “the Lip” Durocher was the manager of the 1951 New York Giants team that won the pennant on Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world.”14 That ‘51 Giants team lost to Stengel's Yankees in the World Series. Durocher coined the term “nice guys finish last.”
There are other noteworthy managers, including Miller Huggins, “the mighty mite” who managed the Murderer’s Row Yankees, and Burt Shotton, who managed the Boys of Summer Brooklyn Dodgers15, but here’s the thing: people are progressively caring less about baseball. As it becomes more niche, you won’t have to know any of these things. But at least it was fun, right? Right?
Odds and Ends
Fred Zinnemann was originally slated to direct, but it ended up being John Sturges behind the camera16…this is one of the earliest movies to use green screen...the Old Man mentions an island of sargasso weed; sargasso is seaweed, making up a namesake sea17…a fathom is six feet…the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is the physical heart of Jesus, represents “God’s boundless and passionate love for mankind”...the Old Man sees Rigel, one of the brightest stars (along with Betelgeuse) in Orion; Rigel’s name is from the Arabic for “foot” (since it’s in Orion’s foot)…mako sharks, the villains of The Old Man and the Sea, get their name from Maori; they’re the fastest shark.
In the book, his name is Santiago, but in the movie he’s credited as “Old Man” and they never mention his name. They also call the Old Man “salao,” which means “unlucky”; this comes from “salado,” which means “salty.”
And not like Dan O’Herlihy in Robinson Crusoe.
If you wanna get wild, you’ll want to know about Hemingway’s friendships with Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and Scott Fitzgerald.
The southernmost incorporated point in the continental U.S. is in Key West (though yeah, that’s a lot of qualifiers). The actual southernmost point in the U.S. is in American Samoa.
I made up this “Big Three” grouping. Hemingway only published five novels during his lifetime; the other two were “Across the River and into the Trees” and “To Have and Have Not.” You should also have an awareness of his posthumous novels, “Islands in the Stream” and “The Garden of Eden,” along with a posthumous memoir, “A Moveable Feast.”
“The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose.”
Other Heminway short stories include the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams, who appears in works like “Big Two-Hearted River” and “The Killers.”
Played by Nicole Kidman in the 2012 TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn.
Ford Madox Ford? What’d he write? “Look Homeward, Angel,” maybe? Oh, that was a different guy? Shoot.
Joe Posnanski has written a lot on this topic, including this recent post (paywalled).
Real name Cornelius McGillicuddy, though that sounds even more made up.
Mack’s grandson, Connie Mack III, was a senator from Florida and was considered a potential running mate for Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000. Connie Mack IV also represented Florida.
His time with the Yankees came on the heels of Joe McCarthy’s tenure, who managed from 1931 to 1946 and won seven World Series titles. Yeah, the Yankees have won a lot of World Serieses.
You know the call: “THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!” The win was revenge for Durocher, since he had previously managed the Brooklyn Dodgers.
One of those Boys of Summer was Jackie Robinson, breaker of baseball’s color barrier. You might need to know about Dodgers executive Branch Rickey, who was instrumental in signing Robinson.
Our very first column in this series was on Sturges’ The Magnificent Yankee, and we saw Sturges again with Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock. I didn’t love his direction in those first two flicks but here his unfussy camera work and naturalist were the right fit.
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys is a rewriting of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre from Bertha Mason's point of view. I’m guessing it has very little to do with the Sargasso Sea.