Some of these were shot at depths of up to 100 feet, and Nolte and Bisset both survived potentially fatal moments in the process. The Deep was filmed on location in Bermuda, and all of the primary actors (along with Yates) learned to dive so they could shoot their own underwater scenes. Instead, Bondurant is killed by a giant moray eel that haunts the area, and the good guys get away with the treasure.Īlthough the movie doesn't work, it's not for a lack of trying. When he finds out through a local rummy named Adam Coffin (Wallach) that they're more interested in salvaging the treasure than his drugs, however, Bondurant takes two of his henchmen out to the dive site to kill them. Unfortunately, the morphine attracts the attention of a Haitian drug-runner named Henri Bondurant (Louis Gossett Jr.), who is determined to bring up the rest of the shipment of morphine and sell it on the street.īondurant torments the young couple with some voodoo shenanigans until they and Treece agree to bring the morphine up and sell it to him. They take the gold to local treasure hunter Romer Treece (Shaw), who eventually helps them discover that because the two ships sank more or less on top of each other, the Spanish gold has been covered by the World War II wreck. On the same dive, they also find what turns out to be a small ampule of morphine from a sunken World War II cargo ship.

Released in the summer of 1977, The film featuring all of this talent follows a young couple named David Sanders and Gail Berke (Nolte and Bisset), who discover what appears to be a piece of treasure from a sunken Spanish galleon when they're diving off the coast of Bermuda. They also cast a mix of established and up-and-coming actors to give The Deep both street cred and buzz: Robert Shaw, who had given an all-time great performance as Quint in Jaws Eli Wallach, who was never less than stellar in any of the 90-some films he appeared in Jacqueline Bisset, whose it-girl looks belied her serious acting chops and Nick Nolte, who had only one other big feature film to his credit but was clearly on the cusp of stardom. They hired Peter Yates to direct, who had a number of fine action movies on his resume, including the classic 1968 Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt and the 1973 Robert Mitchum gem The Friends of Eddie Coyle. So why not use all of those elements again?Ĭolumbia Pictures bought the rights to Benchley's follow-up novel about treasure hunting off Bermuda. That film had been based on a novel by Peter Benchley, made by a stylish director and featured an adventurous water-born story. The film's beginnings, like so much of '70s cinema, lie with the phenomenal success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws two years before.

The deep peter benchley movie