Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 May 22 • Wednesday

Underwater! (1955) is the kind of movie I like to watch on a lazy summer afternoon. It's a Technicolor spectacle about divers looting a sunken ship for treasure. In a bit that Irwin Allen might have admired, the ship is perched on the edge of a precipice and so might tip and fall into a trench at any time, thus making it almost a Wages of Fear-type of task.

This is a Howard Hughes movie so the real spectacle is Jane Russell.

So-called low culture of the fifties and early sixties appeals to me and suggests the phrase "mid-century prurience". The subtext for almost every situation is sex, usually the kind you're not supposed to be having (pre-marital, extra-marital and non-consensual being the most prevalent).

Underwater scores high for mid-century prurience by having two definitely not straight-laced heterosexual couples all alone on a boat off the shores of Cuba. They dive for treasure by day but how to spend their nights?

Hughes must have felt this was too risky and so he disarms the situation by having a fifth person on board, a priest! No more fooling around.

Part of the reason I wanted to see it was for the song "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White". I was familiar with it only as a big hit for Perez Prado but one day came across the sheet music for it in a thrift shop or a used book store.

Prado himself is in the movie and performs the song, which also features prominently in the score.

That's him on piano. I love the way Victor Young used the theme in his music for the film. I wouldn't mind having this soundtrack!