A “triangle” set on the background of Pacific Coast fishermen hard lives, with the impending danger of the sharks which contend with Robinson the main role. An unfamous, but absolutely remarkable Hawks’ film.
“We think the performance by E.G. Robinson as a Portoghese fisherman complete with the accent may be the finest of his career. In one of the few early sound films to be done on location, Hawks with the help of Tony Gaudio has attempted to make the characters a part of their surroundings in what is probably one of the most visually integrated Hollywood films of the time.»
G. Peary, S. Graark, The Velvet Light Trap, n. 1, 1970

Tiger Shark is the dramatic opposite of A Girl in Every Port, with the difference that mutilation and invalidity are the actual core of the story. (…) Just like Hawks’s sound films before it, Tiger Shark is about obsession. Mike is its incurable victim. He obsesses about sharks, which had “stolen” his hand and hence deprived him of being whole physically, dealing a blow to his sense of manhood. His obsession becomes a blinding neurosis. He is no longer capable of analyzing reality in the home and in his profession, whether it means the father figure he embodies for Quita or the questionable relations between her and Pipes. A victim of sharks, Mike becomes the victim of himself and expresses a desire to kill himself, trying to re-create the power he lost with verbal and painful rage. But whatever he does, his soul is just as definitively amputated as his body. With Tiger Shark, Hawks shows a morbid interest in powerlessness and invalidity. (…) The pattern that emerges from the film’s fabric is the crystallization of physical and moral infirmity. Human beings become victims of external, uncontrollable and hostile nature (storms, sharks, oceans…) and internal human impulses (jealousy, desire, sexual block, need for revenge). Unable to harmonize these two elements, the characters turn into children and try to reinvent the world according to what haunts them.

Noël Simsolo, Howard Hawks, Edilig, Paris, 1984