Three deep sea divers get involved in murder while searching for a lost treasure.
Manfish is an adventure film, released by United Artists in 1956 and originally filmed in DeLuxe Color. Actor John Bromfield starred as Captain Brannigan and Lon Chaney Jr. played the role of Swede. The leading female star was Tessa Prendergast, who played Alita. Tessa later became a fashion designer and designed the white bikini of Ursula Andress for Dr. No. The film also featured the motion picture debut of Barbara Nichols.
This film caught me by surprise a bit. Since Lon Chaney was in it I thought it would be about some dude that turned into a monster fish type thing. Turns out it's just an adventure film with some scubba diving. The poster up top says it's in color but the version I saw was black and white. I'm not sure what the deal is with that.
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| Swede |
Director W. Lee Wilder sets his story on a boat called
the Manfish and borrows from two Edgar Allen Poe plot lines: The Gold
Bug and The Telltale Heart. The story in summary is about an unpleasant captain who is forced to
join forces with an unpleasant professor in order to locate a horde of
buried pirate treasure. This situation becomes a game of cat and mouse
that ends very badly.
Lon Chaney is the title lead of this movie but he's a third wheel and not the main focus of the story. He is Swede, a simple man who cares only about
the Manfish. (His boat) He also concedes at one
point during the movie that the Manfish is the only woman he's ever
had. Swede provides some moral center to the film, but it all falls
within the context of his love for the Manfish.
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| The skeleton holding a treasure map that gets the party started. |
Serious editing and continuity problems mar the picture. The film is a sea adventure but it turns into a tense thriller for the
final third. It has some pleasing Jamaican on-location photography too,
with some good underwater scenes. There is no reason to rush out and try to find this film but it wasn't terrible.
