After the Storm is a 2001 American adventure film starring Benjamin Bratt, Mili Avital, Armand Assante, and Simone-Élise Girard.
The story centers around the efforts of a group of people to salvage valuables from a sunken yacht in the Bahamas in 1933 and their schemes to betray and double-cross one another.
Originally intended for theatrical release, it instead was broadcast as a television film in the United States on the USA Network.
Arno — a World War I veteran whose father followed Arno's advice to invest heavily in stocks and hanged himself after losing the family's money in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 — left everything behind after his mother also died soon afterward, taking with him only his father's expensive pocket watch.
While in town one day in 1933, Arno discovers that Coquina, a woman he is attracted to, has returned from a three-year stay with her uncle on another island.
Arno also encounters Janine's husband Jean-Pierre, a Frenchman who operates a boat named La Chamade that he uses both for marine salvage work and to offer charter cruises as a gigolo for wealthy female tourists.
Arno tries to find the Pride of Chicago to deliver the package he picked up on Bimini, but discovers that the yacht sank in the storm and lies upside down on the ocean bottom in shallow water.
Through portholes, he sees the drowned bodies of women he had met aboard the yacht, still adorned with expensive jewelry.
Jean-Pierre has heard about US$1 million in gold in a safe aboard the sunken Pride of Chicago and that a major search for her wreck has begun.
In exchange, Arno will reveal the location of the Pride of Chicago, do the diving to bring up valuables from the wreck, and agree to split the profits.
As he visits the diving bell to breathe, Janine proposes that they double-cross Coquina and Jean-Pierre, keep all the treasure for themselves, and run off together.
In an effort to appease Ortega, Arno and Jean-Pierre both reveal the hiding places for their shares of the treasure aboard the La Chamade, but a struggle ensues.
He laughs ironically when Sergeant Major Jim arrives on another boat to arrest Jean-Pierre and him for possession of the gold.
[1] Hemingway based the short story on a purportedly true story a charter-boat captain in Key West, Florida, told him in 1928 about a conch-fisherman's account of the sinking of the Spanish steamer Valbanera with the loss of all 488 people on board on September 9, 1919, during the 1919 Florida Keys hurricane.
The short story's anonymous narrator gives a first-person account of escaping a bar fight by slashing his assailant with a knife and fleeing in a skiff to hide out in the belief that he had killed the man.
He returns to shore, discovers that the man he slashed did not die, and learns that the liner – reportedly carrying gold on board in a safe – had sunk when she sprang a leak during a storm and her boilers exploded, killing her entire crew and all 450 passengers aboard.
[2][3] Although the location of Hemingway's story – apparently the Florida Keys[2] – is ambiguous at best[2] and it provides no dates for its events, Hotchner sets the film in the Bahamas in 1933.
Like Hemingway's anonymous narrator,[2] Hotchner's Arno character believes he stabbed a man to death in a bar fight, flees to avoid arrest, and discovers a sunken vessel containing the body of a woman (two women in the film version) wearing jewelry, although the unnamed ocean liner in Hemingway's story[2] is replaced by the yacht Pride of Chicago in the film.