Deep in the Shallow Waters

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE DEEP

Directed by PETER YATES Screenplay by PETER BENCHLEY and TRACY KEENAN WYNN

The Deep isn't--very deep, that is.

It does have, however, a very pretty lady (Jacqueline Bisset) who can be observed scantily, or at least wetly and therefore clingingly, clad on every possible occasion. There is also some pretty underwater photography and some pretty fair suspense as good guys and bad guys thrash around on the ocean bottom looking for long-lost treasure of the Spanish Main, which is all mixed up with some more recently misplaced valuables --morphine that the wicked ones want to turn into heroin.

The story also has some pretty serious problems, or, perhaps more accurately, some puzzling aspects for what is intended as summer-weight entertainment. The most curious of these is a certain unconscious--or is it semiconscious?--racism. The crowd pursuing the almost-heroin is composed entirely of black men, and their interest in sexually tormenting Ms. Bisset is at least as powerful as their greed for the drug. She is cast as a nice innocent kid trying to spend a quiet week in Bermuda with her boy friend. Out scuba-diving, they discover tantalizing clues to both treasures. Very soon she is being forced to strip in front of the assembled baddies, though she could not possibly conceal the object they seek --a large medallion--on her pretty person. A little later they invade her room dressed in voodoo getups, smear her body with blood and seem to do something rather peculiar with a chicken claw they're carrying. The sadism is excessive for this context, and the employment of blacks in the roles of sex fiends caters to an ugly racial stereotype that should have died with D.W. Griffith.

Beyond that, there are the Nick Nolte and the Robert Shaw problems to deal with. The former, playing Bisset's lover, is one of those sun-kissed California lads, very cool and laid-back in the current West Coast fashion among males. He made his mark in TV's Rich Man, Poor Man, and there is obviously a feeling abroad that he can be made into a sort of discount Robert Redford.

Anything is possible, but this script makes Nolte seem a rather sullen whelp.

If he has any of Redford's natural ease, he is unable to force it up between the thick lines he has to speak here.

Wearying Ebullience. As for Shaw -- what are we to do with him? He ap pears to be a congenitally ebullient fel low, willing to do anything to perk up a dull scene. Here he plays the local expert on treasure hunting, full of unexplained but noisy eccentricities, which he cheerfully stresses in a variety of accents and many a broad gesture. He provides energy in what would otherwise be purely expository scenes, but he is rather hard on any scenery or actors who happen to get in his way. Over a long haul, he is also wearying -- like a drunk at a party who refuses to shut up.

On balance, however, we probably ought to be grateful to him for keeping the landlocked portions of the film at least fitfully amusing, just as we owe a vote of gratitude to a very large and ugly eel who lurks menacingly in one of the wrecks out there on the reef. He's not quite Bruce the Shark -- Benchley's immortal underwater conceit -- but he is exceedingly nasty and scary. When we are sharing the murky depths with him, The Deep can be spooky fun. Indeed, they've been clever in piling up devices to distract us from the basic problem of underwater adventure pictures, namely that people moving around in water necessarily do so with boring slowness. Only when it is waddling about on land is The Deep dull.

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