Screened recently in national television in Australia, and on a Saturday afternoon so all 19 million of us could goggle at it in the daytime, the press release for the TV week magazine exclaimed: No Sunken treasure for Gilbert Roland, but oh boy, check Jane's sea Chest!.....now how could anyone miss that. Not ever seen in 3D here we have had to make do with that. Snazzy cossies and bubbling romance, this sensational lung stretcher cost as much as A STAR IS BORN but hasn't endured like Judy did. Jane is as gorgeous as ever and the film is fish tank pretty. Watch it and love it. No wonder poor RKO went bust too.

Here's a rare chance to see Jane Russell give a truly ridiculous performance as a sultry Latina with an unconvincing Spanish accent. She is married to deep sea diver Richard Egan, who along with older Latin lothario Gilbert Roland, wants to go down to the depths to collect the gold from a sunken ship in the Caribbean. Russell fills her performance with fury, but she's not at all believable in her part (where was Abbe Lane?) so her presence becomes a distraction from the often dully plotted adventure yarn. The film opens on a fantastic note with the credits (set underwater) rolling over a very classical sounding version of "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" which Cuban bandleader Perez Prado made very popular in a mambo recording that has stood the test of time. The Prado version appears several times in the film, once with Prado and his band playing it in a cafe sequence, and another rather sultry sequence where Egan chases a playful Russell on the beach of the island that they, along with Roland and his younger girlfriend, Lori Nelson, have a picnic on.

There's the typical danger with both the risks of diving in these rocky waters (and going into the hull of a much damaged ship that could collapse in on the divers at any minute) and crew members who may have nefarious plans of their own. The film is narrated by the third billed Egan who is really the lead, and at one point, I had a chuckle over his line, "Capital is the least of my worries", considering that his last acting job was as the wealthy patriarch Sam Clegg on the daytime soap opera "Capitol". Technically, this film is extremely well done, with the photography breathtaking and almost 3-D in nature, but script wise, it often becomes boring when the actors (or stuntmen) are not diving down to the depths to retrieve the gold and other treasures they find. I've been searching for this film for years ever since first seeing it when it came out on VHS in the early 1990's, and while the second trip underwater was a slight disappointment, I did find many things in it to enjoy. If only director John Sturges had gotten Russell some lessons in a proper Spanish accent where she didn't sound like a female version of Speedy Gonzalez!