Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

utgard14 Portuguese fisherman (Edward G. Robinson) loses a hand to a shark and later loses his young wife (Zita Johann) to his best friend (Richard Arlen). He doesn't like it. A simple plot that was reused by Warner Bros. many times over the years. It's an okay early film from Howard Hawks. Worth watching for Robinson's colorful performance. Eddie G's sporting an earring and a hook for a hand, folks. It's not Shakespeare but it's hard to look away. Real maritime footage is a plus. Classic horror fans will recognize Zita Johann from The Mummy, which was released this same year. She's a lot more subtle in this than in that film.

mark.waltz When Spencer Tracy played the Portugese fisherman in MGM's "Captains Courageous", he dealt with wags laughing at him for his Chico Marxx hairdo. Here, Edward G. Robinson has the same job and the same issue. If, unlike, Spencer Tracy, he didn't win an Oscar for his performance, he still rates an "A" for giving an excellent portrayal in an entertaining if sometimes over-the-top and gruesome melodrama.The story of Portugese fisherman Robinson starts when he is revealed to be one of three survivors of a capsized boat off the coast of Baja California in shark infested waters. Robinson immediately disposes of one of them into the briny sea after attempting to steal their water supply. The other sole survivor is young Richard Arlen who fights off the sharks right before one of them bites off Robinson's hand, leaving him an American version of Captain Hook. Robinson and Arlen become buddies and share many adventures together. Later, Robinson must visit young Zita Johann to tell her that her father was killed at sea, and ends up marrying her. But Arlen strikes her fancy in spite of her initial rejection of him, and when Robinson sees them in a romantic clinch, he plots revenge.Set on the Mexican Pacific coast for its fishing sequences and near San Diego for its dramatic story, "Tiger Shark" is an enjoyable mix of action and melodrama. Robinson provides a very layered performance as the rather ruthless fisherman who is loyal to his crew members but deadly to his foes. His final scene really sums up what is inside this character as he faces his own mortality. The film was remade several times by Warner Brothers, most notably as "Manpower" (1941), where Robinson played basically the same role, co-starring George Raft and Marlene Dietrich. That version switched the story from deep sea fishing to the world of men who repair electrical lines, and was used as a major plot device in the Warren Beatty gangster bio "Bugsy".

barnesgene Those of us who read the entire book "Moby Dick" will remember interminable scenes devoted to descriptions of whale hunting and harvesting. That's how "Tiger Shark" seems: lots of extended scenes of tuna fishing and processing the catch. It really does serve to set a mood, and of course it juxtaposes the everyday life of a fisherman with the out-of-the-ordinary plot. And anyone with an interest can see how tuna fishing was actually performed in the Thirties. Big deal.For me, the movie started dragging from the git-go. I found Edward G. Robinson's unconvincing Portuguese patois boring from the first line, and his mother-lode of innocent jibber-jabber seemed grafted artificially onto the Robinson persona while never actually gelling. (John Wayne had a more successful outing with an accent when he played a Swede in an early film.) Then this Pipes-Quita romance comes along. Comes from out of nowhere. Suddenly she's in love. PUH-leese. A little poetic motivation might help things.Add the sappy ending. Yep, a solid "3".

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre All the old-time Hollywood studios recycled their scripts, turning previously-filmed properties into remakes and then re-remakes. More so than any other studio, Warner Brothers were notorious for re-re-re-remaking their previous films with only very slight changes in setting and dialogue. "Tiger Shark" is an historically significant film, as this movie provided the original template for a plot line which Warners recycled about two dozen times ... each time with just enough changes to fool the audience into thinking they were seeing an original plot. Except for stories which are in the public domain (such as Cinderella), "Tiger Shark" holds the all-time record for being re-made MORE OFTEN than any other movie ... each remake being "disguised" as a new movie.The basic plot is this: an older man with a physical handicap falls in love with an attractive young woman who owes him a favour. She marries him, more out of a sense of obligation than for love. Then she becomes attracted to a handsome young man who works alongside her handicapped husband. The young man returns her attraction, and they start having an affair. The husband discovers his wife's infidelity, and then (in the climax of the film) he and the younger man duke it out. That's the plot of "Tiger Shark", starring Edward G. Robinson, and it's also the plot of two dozen other Warners films which are uncredited remakes of "Tiger Shark".Compare this film to "Manpower" (1941), also starring Robinson. In "Tiger Shark" he plays a one-handed fisherman, with a hook at the end of his left arm. In "Manpower" he plays an electrical lineman with a limp. In both films, his love interest is a younger woman with a European accent: Zita Johann here, Marlene Dietrich in "Manpower". Robinson's younger rival in "Tiger Shark" (played by Richard Arlen) is basically the same character as Robinson's rival in "Manpower" (George Raft). The climax of "Tiger Shark" is a fight on the seashore; the climax of "Manpower" is a fistfight at the top of a telephone pole during a lightning storm. Once you allow for the change of setting, they're both the same film. I could make the same connections between "Tiger Shark" and about two dozen other Warners films, not all of them starring Robinson."Tiger Shark" benefits from some excellent direction by Howard Hawks. Richard Arlen is unfairly forgotten nowadays, but he was the closest thing Hollywood had to Harrison Ford before Harrison Ford came along. (I'm referring of course to the modern Harrison Ford, not the silent-film actor of the same name.) Arlen gives a good performance here. Zita Johann is excellent here, hampered only by her thick accent. She retired early from films to marry the producer John Houseman, long before Houseman became an Oscar-winning actor. Johann's most famous role is the female lead in "The Mummy" opposite Boris Karloff. When Johann published her autobiography in the 1980s, the publishers' promo material played up the fact that Johann had co-starred with Karloff, but they managed to avoid mentioning *which* Karloff film she'd been in: apparently they were afraid we would think that Zita Johann was a "scream queen" actress who only starred in horror films.I'll rate "Tiger Shark" 7 out of 10 on its own merits, or 9 points if you're an aspiring screenwriter who wants to study this film so you can learn how a single plot line can be reworked repeatedly.