Key West and the Florida Keys have a bit of a film history – “The Rose Tattoo,” “Criss Cross,” “Operation Petticoat,” “Miami Vice.” Like a lot of Keys history, there are highs and lows. My favorite of these movies may not be well made, but it gives glimpses into the Key West of yore.
For instance, “Cuba Crossing” was a low-budget movie filmed down here. It is also sometimes called “Assignment: Kill Castro” and “Sweet Dirty Tony,” because it was allegedly based on the exploits of Capt. Tony Tarracino. And maybe it was. He appears in the film as a rider on horseback. But the movie was so incoherent it’s hard to say for sure. They shot a lot of scenes at Captain Tony’s Saloon, complete with drag queens, sailors getting cruised in the bathroom, attractive young waitresses and a bar brawl that I’m pretty sure was choreographed by the same people who did the one in “Airplane!,” which also came out in 1980. Also, whenever the main character drives around town, someone says, “Hey, Captain Tony!”
The movie had Robert Vaughn from “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” in it, as well as Michael V. Gazzo, who earned an Oscar nomination for his role in “The Godfather, Part II,” though in this movie he mostly smoked cigars and laughed maniacally at his own jokes to fill up empty parts of the script.
What it lacked in plot and direction, it (almost) made up for in yore-ness. There were scenes shot at a bunch of different marinas, at Fort Zachary Taylor before it was a state park, and at the old tower at the old Turtle Kraals. There was a long helicopter tracking shot of a woman driving an era-appropriate pink Thunderbird across the old Bahia Honda bridge. Also there were cameos by Iguana Man (See: “The Key West Picture Show”) and Joy Hawkins (See: Red Barn Theatre).
The 1987 movie ”Russkies,” starring Joaquin (then Leaf) Phoenix, Peter Billingsley (“You’ll shoot your eye out” Ralphie), and, unexpectedly, singer/songwriter/goddess Carole King, looks to have been almost completely shot in Key West, and gives a nice sense of the town midway between the hippie/drug smuggling era and full-blown tourism.
The kids ride their bikes around Sigsbee, Clinton Square Market, Clinton Place (because it’s not a square), the Audubon House, Key West Bight and a lot of trailer parks and backstreets. They also race go-carts at the late-lamented Magic Carpet Golf. There were so many background actors that I was pretty sure I would recognize someone, though I never did.
My wife and I have a multi-decade argument about whether Timothy Dalton was a good James Bond, and whether “License to Kill” was a good James Bond movie. I’m on the not-good side. The movie does have some good Keys parts. Particularly at the beginning, which starts with Bond and CIA agent Felix Leiter jumping onto a plane at the airstrip on Sugarloaf to keep a notorious drug dealer from escaping, peaks with them subduing said notorious drug dealer after they attached his getaway plane to a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter in midair, and ends with Bond and Leiter parachuting down onto Truman Avenue, so Leiter can go into Saint Mary’s and get married.
It also predates the whole vehicle-crashing-off the Seven Mile Bridge thing that would later become such a big deal in “True Lies.” Although, unlike “True Lies,” it didn’t inspire the audience to cheer when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis were saved, while the Lower Keys got nuked.
I could probably go on for pages about how much I love Tom McGuane’s 1972 movie “92 in the Shade,” based on his second-best Key West novel of the same name. But I am 633 words into a newspaper column, writing about locally filmed movies when I am supposed to be writing about wildlife.
How did I end up here? Well, it’s been raining for days, which makes it hard to go out and look at birds. And my good binoculars are broken. And six to eight other excuses.
Also, because I read something recently about a movie called “Mako: The Jaws of Death,” which came out in 1976. It was an early sharksploitation film riding the coattails of “Jaws,” which came out the year before. No one else I knew had ever heard of it, but IMDB and Wikipedia said it was filmed in Key West. And sharks count as wildlife, even if I don’t know much about them. Looking at the movie poster, I think “Mako” was added to the title so they didn’t get sued.
So I watched it. For research purposes.
It starred a character actor named Richard Jaeckel, who had 194 screen credits between 1943 and 1997. He was nominated for an Academy Award for a role next to Paul Newman in “Sometimes a Great Notion.” He ended his career with a 28-episode run on “Baywatch.” Sadly, he was not given a lot to work with in “Mako: The Jaws of Death.”
The other notable actor was Harold Sakata, known to most people as Odd Job, the bodyguard/assassin who lived to behead people with his steel-brimmed bowler in “Goldfinger.” His character mostly laughed at his own jokes to fill out the script.
“Mako: The Jaws of Death” is essentially the story of a man who isn’t out to kill sharks — twist! — but to protect them. Sometimes he kills sportfishermen who hunt them. He has a necklace given to him by a holy man in the Pacific who made sharks trust him.
He lives on an out island in a shack with a hatch in the floor that he can lift to talk with and feed his shark friends, who are always swimming below. Despite his homicidal tendencies, he is a trusting man. He lends one shark to a sexy “aquanaut” who swims in kind of a Weeki Wachee scenario in a tank with windows above a roadside dive bar, after she is told she either has to swim with a shark or swim naked. He lends another favorite pregnant shark to a scientist who wears a kerchief and a short-sleeved safari jacket. Both of them betray him.
He goes mad during a hurricane and ends up ripping off his necklace and committing suicide by shark. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler. But the movie has been out for 49 years.)
The most impressive thing about the movie is that it was largely filmed with real sharks, not Jaws-esque animatronics. You see them coursing by the reef, sometimes attacking people, sometimes letting Jaeckel’s character hitch a ride hanging onto a dorsal fin.
While it is a movie whose moral is that sharks should not be killed wantonly, there are actual dead sharks being used as props everywhere. Dead sharks hanging on hooks. Dead baby sharks stacked like cordwood. At one point, a live shark is shot in the back of the head with a bang stick, with real blood immediately pluming out as it falls to the bottom like a downed fighter jet.
While most of the scenes did not look particularly Key West-ish – for instance, all the buildings were concrete – it was hard to say definitively that it was not filmed in Key West or the Keys. At least not until I searched through some old Miami newspaper archives from the era. Turns out Wikipedia and IMDB were wrong. It was filmed in Miami and the Bahamas.
I think it’s time to watch “92 in the Shade” again. And maybe “Russkies.”zx
