When the summer of ’75 gave us Jaws, audiences discovered that the only thing scarier than swimming in the ocean was Steven Spielberg’s ability to make you afraid of bathtubs. Naturally, Hollywood wanted more fish in the water, more predators, more panic. So, in 1977, Columbia surfaced with The Deep, adapted from Peter Benchley’s follow-up novel. No great white shark this time, no killer whale (Orca had already tried that card). Instead, the monster lurking beneath the waves was more complex: greed, morphine ampoules, Spanish gold, and a moray eel with a bad attitude.
If Jaws was about primal terror, The Deep was about sensual danger—the kind that slips under your skin, tangling you in sunken wreckage and luring you down with the promise of treasure. And if audiences didn’t remember all the plot mechanics, they sure as hell remembered Jacqueline Bisset in that wet white T-shirt, swimming through cinematic history.
Diving Into Treasure and Trouble
The plot is pure seafaring pulp: David Sanders (Nick Nolte, shaggy and intense) and Gail Berke (Jacqueline Bisset, luminous) are vacationing divers who stumble across two wrecks stacked like pancakes on Bermuda’s sea floor—the World War II supply ship Goliath, carrying morphine ampoules and munitions, and beneath it, a 17th-century Spanish treasure ship. In other words: drugs on top, gold below.
Enter Romer Treece (Robert Shaw, fresh off Jaws and chewing through saltwater dialogue with relish), the local historian and treasure hunter who smells opportunity and danger in equal measure. He guides the couple, while Henri “Cloche” Bondurant (Louis Gossett Jr., oozing menace) and his gang of drug smugglers circle like sharks. Toss in Eli Wallach as the shifty Adam Coffin, a man so oily he could have lubricated the camera lenses, and you’ve got a human rogues’ gallery rivaling any underwater monster.
And then there’s the eel. Oh, the eel. Forget Bruce the shark—this bad-tempered ribbon of muscle lurks in the Spanish wreck, striking out with silent, snapping fury. It may not have Spielberg’s mechanical grandeur, but in close quarters it’s nasty enough to make you squirm in your seat.
The Real Special Effect: Jacqueline Bisset
But no review of The Deep can ignore the marketing campaign that leaned heavily—no, exclusively—on Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt. That single image appeared in Playboy and Penthouse spreads, adorned billboards, and threatened to become a full poster before Bisset’s lawyers intervened.
The irony? Bisset isn’t just beautiful—she’s genuinely compelling. Gail isn’t a damsel in distress; she’s adventurous, clever, and holds her own against Nolte’s stubbornness and Shaw’s crusty wisdom. But the studio knew what audiences would remember, and so a young woman swimming became the movie’s Excalibur, a talisman that ensured The Deeplived in pop culture long after its theatrical run.
Shaw, Nolte, Gossett: A Men’s Adventure
Robert Shaw, two years after Quint’s drunken soliloquy in Jaws, gives Romer Treece the kind of gravelly authority that makes you believe he’s lived underwater since the Spanish Armada. His dialogue—rewritten by Shaw himself—rolls off the tongue like rum-soaked poetry. When he says, “This sea has teeth,” you want to check your ankles.
Nick Nolte, in his breakthrough role, is pure 1970s: sun-bleached hair, gravel-voiced with stubborn masculinity that borders on pigheadedness. He’s not quite a movie star yet, but The Deep made him one.
Louis Gossett Jr., as the villain Cloche, gives the film its edge of real-world menace. His crime lord doesn’t need fins or fangs—just a knife, a sneer, and the willingness to dump shark bait into the water to prove a point. Compared to Spielberg’s shark, Gossett feels more dangerous because he’s so terribly human.
Adventure Cinema Done Right
What sets The Deep apart from the flood of post-Jaws imitators is its scope. Director Peter Yates doesn’t treat the ocean as a backdrop; it’s the stage itself. Filming on location in Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, and the Great Barrier Reef, Yates and cinematographer Christopher Challis plunge us into the underworld with dazzling clarity. This isn’t murky fish-tank photography—it’s crisp, vast, terrifyingly beautiful.
The dives, choreographed with real technical innovation, have a slow, suffocating intensity. When the divers squeeze into the Goliath’s wreck, lit only by flashlights, you feel the weight of eighty feet of ocean pressing above you. When they brush past the eel’s lair, you grip the armrest, waiting for the lunge.
It may not have the primal gut-punch of Jaws, but it has a hypnotic rhythm all its own—an adventure yarn shot through with dread.
Benchley’s Second Act
Peter Benchley, poor man, was forever condemned to live in the shadow of his shark. But The Deep, adapted from his 1976 novel, proves he wasn’t a one-trick fisherman. Here he mixes nautical lore, Caribbean criminal underworlds, and centuries-old treasure into a stew thick with atmosphere. The morphine ampoules are a clever plot device: fragile glass phials, filled with both fortune and death, clinking in the sand like hourglasses.
If the novel was beach reading, the movie is beach diving: immersive, seductive, and just dangerous enough to keep you hooked.
Why It Was Forgotten
Released in 1977, The Deep had the misfortune of competing not just with Jaws’ long shadow, but with Star Wars. Who wanted slow, suffocating underwater dread when you could have lightsabers and Death Stars? The film performed well at the box office but never became the pop culture juggernaut Columbia hoped for.
Yet, revisited now, The Deep has a sultry charm. It’s less monster movie than adult adventure, less Jaws than Treasure of the Sierra Madre in scuba gear. And in that lane, it holds up beautifully.
The Humor in the Depths
There’s a sly humor beneath the film’s surface. Shaw, Nolte, and Bisset banter with prickly wit. Gossett’s henchmen bumble like Bond villains in wetsuits. Even the eel, lunging out at all the wrong times, feels like Altman’s idea of a punchline. And let’s not forget Columbia’s marketing misfire—advertising the film so heavily that, according to The New York Times, the average moviegoer had already “seen” fifteen minutes before buying a ticket. That’s not hype; that’s a spoiler reel.
Final Verdict: A Treasure Worth Recovering
The Deep may not have the iconic terror of Jaws, but it deserves more than footnote status. It’s lush, tense, and unapologetically sexy—an underwater adventure where the greatest dangers are greed, betrayal, and one very angry moray eel.
Robert Shaw delivers the sea-salt gravitas, Nick Nolte sweats charisma, Louis Gossett Jr. adds menace, and Jacqueline Bisset shines as both sex symbol and substance. The film’s technical achievements—those crystal-clear underwater shots, those tense dive sequences—still dazzle.
So yes, Orca gave us a vengeful killer whale. Tentacles gave us a giant octopus. But The Deep gave us Jacqueline Bisset swimming into cinematic immortality—and Robert Shaw proving that, shark or no shark, he was the king of the ocean.
Treasure recovered.
