Bisset's wet T-shirt: PG in 1977, “adult content” today.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Yes, the wet T-shirt movie. It caused a bit of a sensation in the summer of ’77. Watching it last week on the Criterion channel, I checked its original rating and then posted the above screenshot on social media with the comment: “Can’t believe it was rated PG.” As if to prove my point, that post was immediately flagged as adult content: “Explicit sexual images,” it said. I guess one generation’s PG is another generation’s X.

The T-shirt is the least dated part of the movie. Most dated: The heroes are white, and just want to scuba-dive and find treasure, while the villains are black, and want to extract 98,000 ampules of WWII-era morphine from the ocean floor for sale on the streets of New York. We get two rape-y scenes with Ms. Bisset: a forced search of her body, complete with pinned hands, spread legs, and smirks; and a voodoo witch-doctor dripping chicken blood on her quivering stomach after her dress is cut off. The latter leads to the worst line in the movie. From the boat, famed treasure hunter Romer Treece (Robert Shaw) notes the lights are out in the hotel and immediately knows; so they rush back and boyfriend David (Nick Nolte) fights through a gaggle of black henchmen on the beach. He finds Gail curled in the fetal position on their bed. Consoling her, he quietly asks what happened. Eventually she’s able to speak. “David,” she says through sobs, “they … painted me!”

A close second: When David and Gail first show the ampule to Treece, he asks if anyone else knows about it. Someone does: Henri Cloche, played Louis Gosset Jr. And then we watch as David, with all the awkwardness of 1970s white America, struggles to describe him: 

Last night, a bald guy came up at dinner, said he was a glass collector. He described that perfectly. [pause] I didn’t show it to him. [pause] Looked like a basketball player.

God, I love that so much. Couldn’t say he was black, because that would seem racist, so he goes with something way more racist. Oh, you mean he was tall, David?

American clod
The movie is based on a novel by Peter Benchley, his first since “Jaws,” and he was given first crack at a script, too, which was found wanting. So it was handed off to Tracy Keenan Wynn, son of, and that wasn’t what director Peter Yates wanted, either. So Yates brought in his script doctor Tom Mankiewicz. Online, you’ll find repeated assertions that Shaw and Nolte wrote a lot of their own lines, but in his memoir Mankiewicz says Shaw didn’t write anything, the two of them simply talked, and Mankiewicz included a lot of what Shaw said. As for Nolte, Mankiewicz was less impressed. 

Nolte: Now, this line. I would never say this line.
Shaw: Nick, are you saying you wouldn’t say it or the character wouldn’t say it?
Nolte: Well, I guess I’m saying I wouldn’t say it.
Shaw [to Mankiewicz]: That’s the trouble with young actors these days. They don’t want to play anything. They just want to be themselves.

At least “The Deep” has the veneer of a ’70s film. It treats its adults as adults—David and Gail, unmarried after three years, bicker around the edges of their disappointments—even as Treece calls David “boy” and Gail “girl” throughout. “Do you believe that, boy?” and “I’m all the government you need, boy,” and “As you please, boy.” (We should be thankful Nolte’s character wasn’t black.) In this manner, he keeps taking David down a notch but bucks him up before Gail. She intuits the stuff they’re finding on the ocean floor was a grocery list that the Duchess of Parma demanded from King Philip of Spain, and then, in an aside, laments the parse offerings she’s received from David over the years: a sweater and a pair of sneakers. “Well,” says Treece, “he isn't the King of Spain, is he, girl?”

They’re a mismatched couple: exquisite British beauty and American clod. Nolte was three years older than Bisset—35 to her 32 during filming—but she’d been a star for 10 years while he was just breaking big in the wake of “Rich Man, Poor Man,” and he comes off as younger. I guess he’s supposed to. I read the novel back in the day and I believe there’s a scene where David takes stock of himself before a mirror: his body, his tanline, the hardness of his feet. And what did he have to show for it? A bunch of T-shirts. In the film, the disparaging T-shirt line is given to Gail, but as a 14-year-old, reading it, I remember thinking, “Sounds like the life to me.” As a 62-year-old, I get it.

In the opening scenes, David and Gail, vacationing and scuba-diving in Bermuda, find two interesting items on the ocean floor near the wreck of a ship: an ampule with liquid inside; and an old encrusted coin/medallion. Gail, probing beneath the hulk with a stick, also almost has her arm pulled out of its socket by a giant moray eel. He’ll be back.

So: two items that point to two vast treasures. Not bad for a couple of tourists. Apparently there’d just been a big storm, and this ship hulk, The Goliath, World War II-era, had shifted, revealing its bounties. It was also on top of the other, older ship.

Initially everyone pretends to be what they are not. Cloche, seeking the ampule, says he is a collector of Reinhardt bottles, while David, pounding on Treece’s lighthouse door, says a friend found the coin/medallion a month earlier. (I get Cloche’s subterfuge, not David’s.) Then the first dangerous encounter. On mopeds, David and Gail are nearly run off the road by a truck and immediately kidnapped and taken to Cloche. There, we get the first rapey scene as Cloche’s men search them for the ampule that (unbeknownst) Treece has pocketed. Gossett is good in a thankless role. “Have a good dinner,” he says. “Go daaaancing. But be off the island by tomorrow.”

Instead they team up with Treece. Kinda sorta. He wants to blow up the Goliath to ensure the morphine doesn’t wind up in some kid’s arm, while David wants to find more treasure, which is why they dive together. So why does it take Treece another hour+ to blow up the ship? Because he finds a triple-lock box, indicating, yes, the great treasure David believes is there. Treece also makes two mistakes. He doesn’t let the Goliath’s sole survivor, Adam Coffin (Eli Wallach), dive with them, setting the stage for his treachery; and they leave Gail on shore, setting the stage for the second rapey scene.

A three-day truce is negotiated between Treece and Cloche at a cricket match (good scene), but no one trusts anyone, and anyway the thrust is to solve the mystery of it all, since, per 18th c. manifests, the ship below the Goliath shouldn’t be there. They need to establish provenance so the stuff they’re finding will be valuable.

We get another dive, this time with Gail, and then a fourth, during which Cloche’s men show up and dump chum in the water to attract sharks. For the fifth and final go, Cloche and his men make the mistake of following our principles into the water. Worse, they go man-to-man rather than zone, while Cloche, per the rules of Hollywood thrillers, attacks master diver Treece. Not smart. Treece doesn’t even have to kill him, he lets the moray eel do that. Which … Hey, wouldn’t that have been a good time to pause the demolition? Since Cloche wasn’t around to move the morphine? And you could preserve the history in that bottom ship?

I remember my father’s disappointment with the ending. The fuse has been lit, and David has to choose between going after the artifact that proves provenance or helping Treece. He helps Treece. But then Treece goes for the artifact, and post-explosion, surfaces with the thingamabob, which he tosses across the water and David catches one-handed. Freeze frame.

He had to choose, Dad said, but he got both.

I nodded. As an anxious teenager, though, I had less a problem with that than Treece throwing the artifact across the water in the first place. If David drops it, or Treece throws poorly, you might never find it again—particularly with the ocean clouded with post-explosion detritus. Can’t someone be careful for a second?

Old log
My father’s review was mixed. He wrote that “while enough of it takes place in the deep to give you the bends,” with “enough on-shore hazards to stock a Pearl White serial,” they didn’t make you feel “the fascination [the ocean] holds for otherwise sensible people.” He liked the scenery, particularly Bisset, compliments Shaw and Nolte, whom he calls “an Old Log Theater alumnus,” and calls out the white/good black/bad stuff. The press-kit photos wound up with Chris and me. Chris kept his, 10 in all, which I came across after his death. See below.

Shaw is great but Romer Treece is an awful name. Bisset is a surprisingly good actress—the subtle emotions on her face, for example, when Cloche interrupts their dinner. Robert Tessier has a nice part as Treece’s strong right-hand man Kevin, who has to battle Cloche’s muscle-bound right-hand man. I liked him. He's Samwise before Samwise. 

I’m curious what the box-office hopes were. They were doing the next Benchley after “Jaws,” had brought back Shaw, and added Bisset in a wet T-shirt. And yes, the movie did well—sixth-highest grosser for the year. It opened in June, the same as “Jaws” two years earlier, and Bisset was a definite conversation piece. But the movie was swamped by an odd little film that opened in 43 theaters a month earlier: something called “Star Wars.” Monsters in the deep were already old news.

Nolte kept going but Shaw didn’t last much longer. After two more films he died of a heart attack in August 1978, age 51. Bisset starred in a movie a year for a while, with some uninspired choices (“Inchon,” “When Time Ran Out…”); and then we blinked and she was Rob Lowe’s mom in “Class.” Benchley’s next novel/film, “The Island,” kind of ended his run as the go-to sea guy. But Yates had one great ’70s film left in him.

Chris' treasure of an all-time beauty searching for treasure.