Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12492 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-07-21
• Rating: Exempt
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 94 minutes

Synopsis
In this full-length documentary feature, a team of divers seeks Great White Sharks in their natural habitats, a journey which takes them all over the oceans of the world. At first, they are content to film sharks from the safety of cages, but as their journey proceeds, they take more risks. This toothsome film, made years before the thriller JAWS, offers its own more realistic brand of thrills.

Customer Reviews

Know your great white from your whitetip? Buy this!
Back in the mid 70s my dad took the 6 year old me to see 'Jaws', and dutifully followed me back outside as I ran screaming from the naked lady onscreen getting torn apart by forces unseen. Though terrified, I was also fascinated (in sharks, that is). Then that Christmas Santa brought me 'Killer Shark', Carole Devaney's wonderful book on the subject. Inside were some of the most terrifying and exhilarating pictures ever - mainly great white sharks lunging at the camera from out of the gloom, teeth bared, dwarfing the cages housing the photographers. Those pictures were from this fabled film, a film I'd been trying to hunting on VHS, DVD and download ever since.

And suddenly it popped up on Amazon just recently - £9.98 plus postage, and it's just a fantastic movie. In the late 60s, rich kid turned adventurer Peter Gimbel organised a team including the legendary Ron and Valerie Taylor. Their aim - to track down the great white and get unparalleled footage of the most feared fish in the sea. We follow them on their dramatic quest, from South Africa to Dangerous Reef in South Australia, where they finally meet their quarry.

What makes 'Blue Water, White Death' so special is its sense of period and occasion. Nowadays you flip on to the Discovery Channel, NatGeo, even Sky 3 and odds are you'll hit on a shark doco sooner than later. That wasn't the case in the late 60s/early 70s - this expedition was a big deal. And the crew react as such, their story is filled with minor and major dramas. Bless them, they admit in the bonus doco on the DVD to 're-enacting' certain conversations to maintain the narrative thread of the movie, but it's done without guile, you don't feel manipulated. They've even got a folk singer, Tom Chapin, as part of the crew! He sings over shots of their ship buffeted by waves, surrounded by dolphins (Steve Zissou/Seu Jorge, eat your heart out) and his Arlo Guthrie-style voice really adds to the late 60s flavour.

As for drama, the movie's loaded with it. The editing and photography of the shark footage is as good as I've seen. There's real danger implied here, especially when the whole team of six divers are surrounded by a school of several dozen oceanic whitetips. As the team notes in the making of doco, that wouldn't happen in the 21st Century - those sharks simply are no longer there. The team's recent reunion is featured too - Ron and Valerie are older but have lost none of their spark or sense of wonder; Gimbell, sadly, passed away in 1987.

What separates this granddaddy of shark documentaries is its relative naivety, its superior photography, its sense of event and its historical importance. This is a pioneering moment in film, and every doco and movie focussing on marine life (even 'Jaws') owes it a debt.

It's 30 years since I first heard of BWWD, I'm so glad it was worth the wait.

(PS If you've got this far - and thanks for that - could I also recommend the book 'Blue Meridian' by the expedition's historian, Peter Matthiessen, it's a great read.)

The original Jaws
This is the film that inspired Benchley to write Jaws. The great white does not appear until the latter part of the film, but when it does.....