The Sharkfighters

The Sharkfighters (1956)

FIGHTING THE TERROR OF THE SEAS!

Landing on a small island not far from Havana, Cuba, Lt. Cmdr. Ben Staves joins a Navy scientific project engaged in finding an effective shark repellent to help save the lives of WWII military personnel stranded in shark-infested waters. His zeal for completing the project as fast as possible is explained by his having lost a large percentage of his crew to sharks when his ship was sunk by the Japanese. Against the advice of the others on the project, Staves demands that the new repellent be tested on a live subject surrounded by hungry sharks and will allow no one but himself to be the test subject!

Date of release
1956-11-01
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 13m
Genres
Adventure
Director
Jerry Hopper

Casting

Interesting facts

The Sharkfighters is a 1956 American adventure film starring Victor Mature, supported by Karen Steele, James Olson, and Claude Akins. Directed by Jerry Hopper, its fictional storyline is based on the invention of "Shark Chaser", an historical shark repellent developed by U.S. Navy researchers during World War II.

Production

Samuel Goldwyn Jr. produced the film for Formosa Productions, which released through United Artists. It was Goldwyn Jr's second film, following Man with the Gun. He announced it in December 1954, based on a script by Art and Jo Napoleon. It was called Sharkfighter.

It was based on actual events involving the creation of the Navy's shark repellent, "Shark Chaser", a cake combining copper acetate to mimic putrefied shark tissue, black dye as a camouflage agent, and a water-soluble wax binder as described in the script, which some sources attribute to efforts of Julia Child while working for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

"Shark Chaser" was announced as a successful repellent as early as May 7, 1943. A patent application was made in October 1944 and granted in 1949 to four scientists who also designed the packet, and the product was issued by the Navy until 1973. However its effectiveness is now judged dubious (as is the shark threat inspiring its development) by the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.

Lawrence Roman and John Robinson rewrote the screenplay.

Victor Mature signed to play the lead in December 1955. By this stage, Goldwyn Jr had a camera crew shooting shark footage for several months, although filming did not begin on the film proper until March 1956.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended