As a local beach rat, Eli Wallach looks as if he had been gotten up for a hard-time party.The story, as well as Peter Yates's direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innocent, but the underwater sequences are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling.

Lou Gossett plays the leader of the bad guys, all of whom are black, which may or may not have sociological significance. One is a World War II ammunition ship, with a $2 million cargo of morphine intact, and the other an 18th-century French merchantman that was apparently hauling something that someone has to call-at least once in a review such as this-a king's ransom in precious jewels.Also figuring in the adventure is a gruff but honorable scuba diver, a role played by Robert Shaw with so much colorful crustiness that if he were a boat, and if crustiness were barnacles, he'd immediately sink. Nick Noltt, a blue-eyed blond fellow who appears to have been cloned (clufsily) from Robert Redford's press clippings, plays Frank Hardy.While scuba diving off Bermuda, Jackie and Nick come upon the remains of a sunken vessel that turns out actually to be two.

The opening yesterday of 'The Deep' at Loew's State 2 and other theaters, as well as of 'Exorcist II: The Heretic' (see separate review), mark the arrival of the silly season that more or less coincides with hot weather, out-of-control air-conditioning and asphalt pavements as luxuriously soft as deep-pile carpets.'The Deep,' which is even sillier than the Peter Benchley novel, recalls-though not to its own advantage-the sort of adventures Frank and Joe Hardy used to have on their summer vacations.Jacqueline Bisset, one of Cinema's natural splendors whether she's wearing a white evening dress composed by a poet or a soaping-wet T-shirt, plays the Joe Hardy role.

The deep book peter benchley