Let’s not beat around the scuba tank—The Deep (1977) is the kind of film where treasure lies beneath the surface, both literally and metaphorically, and half the audience came for the plot while the other half came for Jacqueline Bisset’s wet T-shirt. What Peter Benchley started with Jaws, he continued here with a tale of underwater thrills, sunken narcotics, colonial Spanish bling, and enough moray eel attacks to make Freud weep. If this film were a cocktail, it would be part high-seas adventure, part vintage Bond fantasy, and part Penthouse editorial—but shaken, not stirred, and best served with a side of compressed air.
Sunken Concepts and Surface Ambitions
After the megaton impact of Jaws, Peter Benchley was hot property—so hot, in fact, that Columbia bought The Deep before it even left the womb of its galley proofs. Benchley hadn’t even slapped the dust jacket on the thing before producers were writing checks and dreaming of box-office treasure. Enter Peter Guber, a man who could smell profit through six fathoms of marketing, who snatched up the rights for $500,000 plus backend points and who would later, with naked glee, credit a translucent T-shirt for his entire career. Director Peter Yates (Bullitt) was brought in for his kinetic eye and no-nonsense handling of male ego. And ego there was, from every man involved, especially the mechanical eel—nicknamed “Percy”—who had more personality than some of the supporting cast.
Filming this aquatic escapade was no small feat. The cast logged over 10,000 hours underwater, downed over a million cubic feet of air, and built what was at the time the largest underwater set ever constructed—on top of an actual Bermudian hill they cut off like a deranged colonial barber. This thing had sharks, stunt doubles, underwater lighting innovations, and a production calendar more bloated than a corpse in the Gulf Stream. Somewhere amidst the coral and chaos, Benchley even popped up as a background extra, because why not? It’s not like writing the thing was hard enough.
Casting Calls and Bikini Bottoms
At the core of the film are Robert Shaw (slurring nobly through another Benchley tale), Nick Nolte (fresh-faced and angry), and Jacqueline Bisset (fresh-faced and wet). Shaw, playing Romer Treece, a lighthouse-dwelling treasure hunter modeled on real-life Bermudian diver Teddy Tucker, seems to have wandered out of Jaws with the same hat but a different accent. Nolte, in his first leading role, got the part after a hilariously awkward meeting where nobody wanted him—but by the end, everyone did. Hollywood, thy name is passive-aggressive.
And then there’s Bisset. Yes, she’s competent, game for underwater stunt work, and adds tension to the plot. But let’s not kid ourselves: her career—and the film’s marketing campaign—took a sharp uptick thanks to a single shot of her swimming in a see-through top. That image, allegedly snapped without her knowledge, circulated more aggressively than the plot itself. Even Peter Guber, the film’s hype man, boasted that it “made him a rich man.” #FeminismWasStillLoading
Box Office Gold and Critical Salt
The Deep opened with a splash (sorry), grossing $8 million in its first weekend and beating Exorcist II: The Heretic, proving that bad sequels are no match for underwater cleavage and morphine ampoules. It went on to become Columbia’s biggest earner that year, hauling in over $100 million worldwide—though Guber claims he never saw a dime of the backend. Maybe he should’ve asked the eel for accounting help.
Critics, however, were not so generous. Vincent Canby called it “juvenile” with underwater sequences that were “nice enough”—which is basically the cinematic version of a shrug. Roger Ebert was kinder, admiring the photography and praising its novel setting. And the public? Well, they showed up. Jacqueline Bisset was crowned a sex symbol, Benchley kept cashing in, and Columbia popped champagne corks made of coral. A 53-minute extended TV cut (never released on DVD) even made the rounds, offering fans a soggier, soapier version that doubled down on exposition and eel attacks.
Legacy in a Bottle
Today, The Deep remains a pulpy, sun-drenched relic of ’70s adventure cinema: not as tight as Jaws, but far more flamboyant. It’s the kind of film where everyone looks like they smell faintly of rum, salt, and Vaseline, and the audience floats between being thrilled and vaguely titillated. It’s also the only movie where a moray eel kills a drug lord and nobody thinks that’s weird.
So yes, four stars—for the sheer absurdity, the underwater spectacle, and the fact that it tried to be both treasure hunt and drug thriller, Bond knockoff and Benchley sequel, all at once. It doesn’t always work, but it swims like hell trying.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 Stars)
#WetTshirtWonders #PercyTheEelDeservedAnOscar #BissetDidTheHeavyLifting #NotJaws2 #SharkFreeButStillDangerous #TheDeep1977
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