After more than forty days without rain in the city I live, I'm a little bit obsessed with water. This is considering that it has always been my favorite basic element, according to the ancient division of nature into four of these: fire, air, earth and water.
From my devotion to this principle, I have tried to remember three memorable movies in which water has definitely been a kind of basic environment or raw material, and -of course- that I have really enjoyed.
Here they are:
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)
This Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen musical comedy has been selected and registered as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" in the history of American cinema.
A masterpiece that shows a more or less conventional love story about the time when silent movies became "talkies", it is very well known for of its music, songs and especially for its dance scenes.
In the famous sequence in which Kelly sings a little song while spinning an umbrella, he gets soaked to the skin and becames sick with high fever.
Debbie Reynolds was not a very good dancer, so she had to learn. Fred Astaire himself offered to teach her how to get through those shots. The third of the famous song-and-dance team was Donald O´Connor.
Acclaimed as one of the best Hollywood musicals, and regarded as a refreshing and entertaining movie, it comes to my memory as a movie soaked in rain, although indeed it really didn´t have so many moments of flooding.
JAWS (1975)
Jaws, the famous Spielberg movie, gave me awful nightmares for a while, and made me a bit frightened of the idea of swimming in the open sea, especially at night.
Surely, this was only due to the fact of being an easily impressionable teenager. Soon after, I became a very fond of diving, passing a fifty-meters-deep diving exam. So, finally, I don´t think it left me so traumatized.
But it was a water-inundated film that amused me from the very beginning with the scene at the beach party, in which the giant shark appears for the first time from the abyssal ocean and attacks its victim: the unaware swimming girl.
It was very well received by film critics and it was amazing to find out that many of the scenes in the movie were done using mechanical sharks, as they seemed really authentic.
When a fisherman of the area suffers another attack from the killer animal, a warning to the tourists and the temporary closure of the beaches becomes absolutely necessary until the beast is hunted down, but local authorities discredit the version of shark attacks only because of commercial interests.
This is how the plot gets intensifies: policy dilemmas, swimmers and sailors´ fears, hunting activity... or should we say fishing skills?
Great music, a great theatrical run and great cast with interesting performances by Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss, among others.
TITANIC (1997)
James Cameron produced this film about a sinking luxury liner mixed together with a romantic plot. And so the marine disaster covers both circumstances. Its success was total.
The movie begins with the casual discovery -by treasure seekers- of a rare necklace with an incrusted diamond from the sunken vessel of the biggest ever transatlantic passenger ship that had struck against an enormous iceberg.
The most exciting part of the movie, in my opinion, and besides the conventional inter-class romantic relationship between Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet, comes after the collision.
The breaking apart of the ship, the tragic end of many passengers -especially the poorest- when the crew realizes that there are not enough lifeboats for all of them, the voluntary sacrifice of the members of the orchestra trying to give some calm to the general panic...
The music, in fact, has become very well-known and has been frequently played and acclaimed since the film´s premiere.
Its success created a huge general interest in the real story of this particular ship, and probably in all marine archaeological studies on old sunken vessels, forgotten for centuries and laid to rest under tons of water.
The Thanksgiving Turkey
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