The Old Man and the Sea

A painfully sincere, meticulously faithful, and pitifully plodding adaptation of Hemingway's novel about the symbolic struggle between an old Mexican fisherman and a giant marlin. At its most embarrassing in the endless monologues where Tracy has to mouth Hemingway's notion of a poetic patois ('You're a fine fish, Fish, you fight a brave good fight'). The pity of it is that some fine camerawork (from a team that included James Wong Howe and Floyd Crosby) is sabotaged by clumsy back projection and hideous colour matching. Hemingway himself can be briefly glimpsed in a bar scene towards the end.