General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

The Old Man and the Sea (1958 film)

The Old Man and the Sea is a 1958 American drama film directed by John Sturges, produced by Leland Hayward for Warner Bros., and adapted by Peter Viertel from Ernest Hemingway's 1952 novella about an aged Cuban fisherman's battle with a giant marlin. It stars Spencer Tracy as Santiago, with Felipe Pazos as the boy Manolin and Harry Bellaver as the café owner Martin.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	John Sturges (who replaced Fred Zinnemann after Zinnemann withdrew); produced by Leland Hayward for Warner Bros.¹^•²
Cast	Spencer Tracy (Santiago), Felipe Pazos Jr. (Manolin), Harry Bellaver (Martin)¹
Release	August 1958; Los Angeles and New York openings 7 October 1958; WarnerColor; 86 or 89 minutes¹
Cost	Originally budgeted around $2 million; final cost over $5 million³
Academy Awards	Three nominations (Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Music Score); Dimitri Tiomkin won for the score³
Reception	75% Tomatometer (12 reviews), 67% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes; a box office failure relative to its cost⁴^•³
Later versions	A televised version with Anthony Quinn aired on NBC, and Aleksandr Petrov's 1999 animated short¹^•³

Spoilers

Plot

In Cojímar, a Cuban fishing village, Santiago (Spencer Tracy) hauls his skiff ashore after another empty day. The boy Manolin (Felipe Pazos Jr.), who fished with him for years, now has to work a luckier boat because his parents have lost faith in the old man, but he still shows up to carry Santiago's gear, share supper, and argue about baseball, with Santiago declaring the great DiMaggio the finest of ballplayers even though his father was a fisherman. Santiago's luck has run eighty-four days dry, and the village treats him as finished. He announces that he will go out far, alone, into water no one else fishes.

He does, and on the first morning in the deep a giant marlin takes one of his baited lines. The fish is too big to lift, too strong to stop, and for the rest of the film it drags Santiago's small skiff farther and farther from land while the old man holds the line wrapped against his back and shoulders, waiting for it to tire. The struggle stretches across two days and nights. His left hand cramps into a claw and he scolds it like a lazy worker. He catches a small tuna and eats it raw because he has nothing else. He talks to the fish, to the birds, to his own hand, to Manolin, because there is no one else. The marlin finally surfaces and Santiago sees it is two feet longer than his boat.

Santiago, waiting on the fish, remembers his youth: a two-day arm-wrestling match in Casablanca against a giant of a man known as the great negro from Cienfuegos (Don Blackman). Hands like iron, he bets everything on himself and wins at last through sheer refusal to quit, and the film cuts back to the old man on the skiff holding the marlin's line exactly the same way, one hand braced against the planks, his whole life compressed into that grip. The scene works because makeup, lighting, and camera angles make Tracy look twenty years younger, and because it gives the audience the proof the story only implies: this is who Santiago has always been.⁹

On the third day the marlin tires at last. Santiago harpoons it, lashes it alongside the skiff, and turns for home with the biggest fish anyone has ever seen. Then the first shark hits. Santiago kills it with his harpoon, losing the weapon in the body. More sharks come in a pack, and he lashes his knife to an oar; the knife snaps. He fights the next ones with a club, then with the boat's tiller, then with the tiller's stub. Each defense is weaker than the last, and the sharks eat the marlin piece by piece while the old man can only steer and strike. By the time he runs his boat aground and stumbles to his shack, the marlin is a stripped skeleton lashed beside the skiff, eighteen feet of pale bone that the village fishermen measure in disbelief. Santiago sleeps face down with his arms out and his palms up, and Manolin, crying, refuses to let anyone see the ruined hands, and promises they will fish together again.

Characters

Santiago (Spencer Tracy) is the old fisherman at the center of nearly every frame: proud, self-mocking, superstitious about his bad luck, and stubborn past all reason. Tracy plays him as a working man rather than a saint, talking to the sea and his own hand, and he carries the film's long midsection almost alone.

Manolin (Felipe Pazos Jr.) is the boy who used to fish with Santiago and still loves him. Ordered onto a luckier boat by his parents, he keeps returning anyway, and the film's warmest moments are the two of them sharing bad food, talking baseball, and preparing the bait for the far-out trip.

Martin (Harry Bellaver) is the owner of the Terrace, the village bar, who quietly keeps the old man fed.

Interpretations and controversies

Hemingway himself publicly faulted the film, saying "Tracy looked like he was playing Gertrude Stein as an old fat fisherman," and refused to directly endorse it.³ He had been considered as the film's narrator, but the studio used Tracy's voice instead to keep the film's unity.¹⁰ The New Yorker's 1958 critic complained that the marlin in close view had "an unhappy resemblance" to the fake whale from the recent Moby Dick.¹¹ Later home-video reviewers have judged that the novella's existential core gets lost amid patchwork filmmaking and phony fishing scenes, with the Casablanca flashback the one unqualified success.⁹

Sequels, prequels, and universe

None. The story was remade as a 1990 television movie starring Anthony Quinn.³

Development

Hemingway's agent Leland Hayward acquired the story as a property with Warner Bros. as financier and distributor. Anthony Quinn and Humphrey Bogart both lobbied for the role of Santiago before Spencer Tracy was cast. Directors considered included John Huston, Nicholas Ray, and Fred Zinnemann, who was assigned the project and teamed with cinematographer James Wong Howe, his collaborator on High Noon (1952).³

Screenplay disputes. Hemingway, whose contempt for Hollywood was well known, was initially open to Tracy and Zinnemann but balked at Paul Osborn's first draft, which built up the character of Manolin, eliminated the flashbacks and the story's narrator, and added a delirium sequence. Hemingway insisted that Osborn be replaced by Peter Viertel, who had adapted The Sun Also Rises; the request was granted, and Hemingway was retained as technical adviser and appears in a brief cameo.³

Production

The production ran from late April to late July 1956 and again from mid-July to late August 1957, with location work near Cojimar and Boca de Jaruco in Cuba, the actual setting of the story, and sea and sky footage filmed around Hawaii.¹ The studio spent more than $75,000 on a fishing trip organized by Hemingway aboard his own boat, The Pilar, hoping to film a real giant marlin off Cuba; when that failed, the party tried the waters off Cabo Blanco, Peru, with equal lack of success, and Hemingway left the project and returned to Havana.³

The special effects department then built a studio prop marlin with a motor inside that could wiggle its fins and tail. The prop was so big that transporting it from Burbank to Miami required two rail cars; Hemingway took an instant dislike to it, dubbing it "the condomatic fish," and after it was deposited in the Gulf Stream off Havana it vanished beneath the water, never to be seen again.³ Hayward then decided to shoot Tracy's close-ups at sea in a soundstage water tank and to use a double for the long shots filmed in Hawaii.³ The title card credits note that some marlin footage came from the world-record catch by Alfred C. Glassell, Jr. at the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club in Peru.¹

Director change. Fred Zinnemann began the picture, withdrew, and was replaced by John Sturges. In hunting for usable footage of fish, producer Hayward, who ended up nearly $3,000,000 past his budget, sent filming teams to the Caribbean, the Pacific, and a tank located on the Warner lot.² Sturges himself called the finished film "technically the sloppiest picture I have ever made."²

Adaptation approach

The film follows the book almost word for word: Tracy speaks alternately in the first and third person, in what one contemporary review called the most literal, word-for-word rendition of a written story ever filmed.¹ Critics split over this fidelity. Time argued that Hemingway's fable, with its metaphysical weight, was no more suitable for the screen than The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and that the result was mostly Tracy sitting in a rowboat mumbling to himself over Hemingway's own narration on the soundtrack.² The Harvard Crimson found the screenplay too intent on preserving "pristine Hemingwaysque" to show cinematic imagination, retaining an excessive amount of the author's descriptive narrative.⁵ Later scholarship likewise argues the film suffered from being too faithful to the text's actual language, producing plodding plot sequencing.⁶

Reception and awards

The film was previewed in Pasadena to high test-audience scores, and Warner Bros. positioned it as an Oscar contender. The Los Angeles Times called it "one of the most beautiful pictures ever made," and the National Board of Review named it Best Picture of the Year. Even lukewarm reviews often singled out Tracy's performance; Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that Tracy "looks convincingly ancient, with lank white hair and stubby beard," and called his work "an affecting demonstration of primal fortitude."³ The film was screened at festivals in Brussels, Venice, Brazil, and Stratford, Ontario, in 1959.¹

At the Academy Awards it received three nominations: Tracy for Best Actor (lost to David Niven in Separate Tables), James Wong Howe for cinematography (lost to William H. Daniels of Gigi), and Dimitri Tiomkin for the score, which won.¹ Tiomkin had lobbied for a title song to be sung by Mahalia Jackson but was overruled.³

Commercial failure. Despite the awards attention, the film was a box office failure relative to the time and money invested, with costs ballooning from an original budget of around $2 million to over $5 million.³

Hemingway's verdict

Hemingway had little good to say about the film in public. He found fault with the child actor Felipe Pazos, and quipped that "Tracy looked like he was playing Gertrude Stein as an old fat fisherman."³ Scholarly accounts describe his considerable investment of time and money in the project, coupled with frustration over the film's lack of realism and fidelity to his novella.⁷

Later adaptations

Hemingway's story was filmed again as a television version starring Anthony Quinn, which aired on NBC according to the AFI Catalog (other scholarship dates the production 1990), and as a 1999 Russian animated short directed by Aleksandr Petrov, which won an Academy Award for Animated Short; a Bulgarian film, Staretzat i moreto (2002), followed.¹^•³ A study comparing the endings finds that, among the three versions, the 1958 film stays closest to the closing scenes of the novella in how it portrays a worn-out Santiago and a watchful Manolin.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026