Secrets of the Reef

There have been many bad nature films. Often they are fragmentary and exclusively "informative." As often they are too much afflicted with the story line that some producer has decided to impose upon "nature." Rarely does a full length nature film skip both these pitfalls as successfully as Secrets of the Reef.

The movie was photographed both in the Bahamas and in Florida's Marineland Studios by a group of three young men who got some of their training at Harvard where they produced in 1949 A Touch of the Times, the only feature length movie which has thus far resulted from the activity of Ivy Films. In Secrets of the Reef, which started out as a twenty minute short, they sought to suggest the way life happens around a reef in the southern Atlantic less from the viewpoint of men than from that of the creatures themselves. There are no humans in the movie; and Producer Alfred Butterfield's commentary intelligently avoids the Disney practice of lending human characteristics to animals. The result is a restrained film which, due to fine continuity, seems remarkably real.

The continuity is particularly important because not all of the movie could be shot at the real reef in the Bahamas. The group used Marineland's tanks, for instance, to photograph the birth of 200 sea horses from their father's brood pouch. This sequence, together with those of octupus courtship, the pistol shrimp's theft of an arrow crab's meal, and the molting of a spiny lobster's skin-skeleton somehow make a whole.

One of the pleasantest things about the movie is the music, done by Clinton Elliott. Like the camera-work, it is leisurely, following the pace of the creatures. Some themes, like the sea horse's, are really amusing. Though the commentary is occasionally too chatty, it is informative without being ostentatiously so. Thanks to the good taste and restraint of Producer Butterfield and his assistants Secrets of the Reef is a fine movie about the sea.