Retrospective - 1980's "Raise the Titanic"

Terrible film. I can only watch the scenes where they raise the ship. And now that we know that she’s in several pieces, that makes it even more unbelievable. Richard Jordan wasn’t ugly, though.

Was this before Anne Archer found Scientology?

I’m raising the Titanic right now.

BUMP. It's been almost a year. Somebody watch this piece of crap!

I remember watching it as a little kid and being bored out of my mind.

The only scene I remember is when the Titanic is raised and he opens a door and finds a body.

The trailer tells me everything I need to know. Easy pass. .

In the early days of cable (1980, 1981) this was one of those titles on The Movie Channel sometimes three times a day.

I thought Jason Robards was considered an acting legend. Why would he hold such a minor role in such a shitty movie? Early senility?

all of the acting is atrocious

I’d watch an edit with just shots of the bearded guy. 👀

I remember seeing the novel promoted heavily in those Book of the Month Club magazine ads.

I remember the ending, but I won't give it away 😉

Why the hell did my 5th grade teacher show this to us? Did she completely give up?

Also, we were watching the day the Challenger exploded. She told us what happened - then turned on the movie again.

R13 That's legitimate childhood trauma. No wonder you're so fucked up!

In my decrepitude I got it mixed up with "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure."

R15 Another stinker.

Michael Caine and Sally Field are the lovebirds (with zero chemistry or sex appeal). Karl Malden is the crusty sidekick. Telly Savalas is the chrome-dome bad guy. Slim Pickens, Mark Harmon, Shirley Knight, Peter Boyle, and the mom from The Partridge Family co-star as survivors who somehow missed Gene Hackman's group.

Also, the Poseidon had plutonium onboard, because of course it did.

Raise the Titanic was the first hardback book I ever purchased. I had to save my allowance for weeks to do it, but even as a young kid I was the world's biggest Titanic buff. When the film came out I had to see it on opening night. What the actual fuck??? The casting was totally wrong in every role. Actually, pretty much everything was wrong. But the absolute, beyond the pale WRONG was ending the film a little over halfway through the book!! The most exciting part of the book wasn't even included in the movie! The only unfair knock against this film is the criticism of the score. It was quite good.

R16, how DARE you leave out lovely Lost In Space star Angela Cartwright from your list of Poseidon survivors! She and Mark Harmon provided the only actual spark in the whole film.

R17 what was the most exciting part of the book?

After the ship has been raised and floating precariously under tow, it is boarded by Russians desperate to take control and either get the McMuffin or sink her -and a hurricane comes up. There is a lot of cat-and-mouse spy chasing and killing, the tow line is severed and the ship is adrift in the hurricane...

R19 So does the ship sink again in the storm?

Gotta read the book, dude!

Produced by Lew Grade aka Low Grade.

Elliott Gould was offered a lead role, but turned it down: "I don't want to raise the Titanic. Let the Titanic stay where it is."

I loved it as a kid but haven't seen it since. Beyond the Poseidon is a guilty pleasure of mine. I'm not saying it's good but I watch it whenever it's on. Which isn't very often.

Too bad because the book is very good.

Interesting history for that book, R25. Paul Gallico wrote the original novel of The Poseidon Adventure, which was adapted into the Irwin Allen film. The novel hadn't been a huge hit, but it was loosely based on an incident involving the Queen Mary nearly capsizing. When it came time to do a sequel, Gallico couldn't do one for his original novel, as the book ends with the ship finally sinking. So he devised a sequel to the film and began writing it. The novel wasn't quite complete when he died in 1976. Someone ghosted the finish, and the book was released in 1978 with the film version following in 1979. Again, the film made a lot of changes from the book. The book is lightyears better than the film -and the plot is coherent. You can understand why people are risking their lives to board the Poseidon -unlike the film where all plausibility is thrown out the window in the opening credits. I mean, right off the bat the sequel opens on a terrible storm on New Year's Eve -but in the original it was a beautiful, clear night...

Why do I have the idea that when they raise it the ship is restored to its pre-iceberg condition including lights on and staff which is impossible.

Hardly, R27. But the movie ignores history and the novel in so many ways... In the book the remaining funnels are removed as dead weight, and every opening into the ship is sealed. Later, on the surface, they have to cut their way inside, where everything is a rotting mess.

Paul Gallico was hot!

So was Richard Jordan.

I love the lettering of the title on the movie poster, the way they taper toward the bottom. Using this style, they normally tapered at the top, to suggest the movie was as monumental … “as these gigantic letters!!!”

But for this movie the letters taper the opposite way, to indicate they’re equally huge, but they’re way down below you, like the Titanic itself.

I can imagine artists in the art department at CBS having long discussions about that.

They wanted Barbra and Kenny Loggins to sing "Salvage My Heart (Love Theme from Raise the Titanic)," but their competing salary demands proved exorbitant.

Elliott Gould was offered the lead in this movie, but he turned it down.

“I don’t want to raise the Titanic,” he was quoted as saying. “Let the Titanic stay where it is.”

To be fair, their replacements, Debby Boone and Tito Jackson, did a nice job on "Drown Me in Your Love." One of Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager's better efforts, if you ask me.

R34 And don't forget the companion song, "Rust to Rust," by Maureen McCormick, that played over the end credits.

Watching it now. Oh, the cheese.

Which one of these movies had Shirley Jones in it? I know one of them did.

Shirley was in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. She actually is playing the Sheila Matthews-Allen role of the nurse.

Shelley also known as Shirley Winters was in the first Poseidon movie, and Shirley Knight (along with with Shirley Jones) was in the second one and the earlier ship disaster movie, Juggernaut.

Titanic's displacement was 46.000 tons. Last week I saw an item about the latest British cruise liner's delivery at 184,000 tons.

It was a nice fantasy that Titanic might have remained reasonably intact. There was a similar scenario in a Mark Harmon television miniseries, this time with a community of underwater survivors .

At the time of Titanic's sinking, there were several witnesses who reported seeing the ship break apart, but they were ignored or considered unreliable as they were third class passengers, and the surviving officers and first class passengers said she went down whole. The issue is actually brought up in Clive Cussler's novel, which was written long before the discovery of the wreck confirmed the breakage.

The premise of GOLIATH AWAITS was preposterous to say the least.

Why were they so intent on raising it?

R43 The story goes that they discover a super-rare mineral that could be used in a defense application to effectively end the Cold War (in America's favor). Trouble is, the only useful quantity of this magic mineral was shipped aboard RMS Titanic in 1912. The US Navy thus has a reason to invest millions in raising the Titanic, if only to get the rocks out of the cargo hold.

Story is ludicrous, but it's cheap Saturday afternoon fun.

It's weird to think that this movie was released 68 years after the Titanic sank, and 42 years ago it was released.

R45 How is that weird? It's simple math.

It will be weirder in 2048

David Selby looks tall.

6' 2" according to Google.

It's got ten layers of sea critters on it!

One of the things I remember from the book is when the hero boards the ship, he sees the skeleton of a woman (he can tell by the pelvis). The implication is that we're supposed to be shocked women died when the ship sank.

Don't recall much of the movie. The best scene us the actual raising of the Titanic, and you can find that clip on YouTube. Completely outdated now that we know it broke in two when it sank.

R44, it’s actually based on fact, but they shifted it to a mineral being carried by the titanic to create a need to raise that ship specifically. (Although the need to raise it to get the ore is indeed silly.)

The inspiration for this idea was very real though.

Before WWI, the British royal navy ruled the seas with a huge number of steel battleships. Germany wished to challenge this, so they built their own massive steel navy. When Germany surrendered at the end of WWI, their fleet was required to sail to the UK, but the crews of the ships were very, very angry to be handing over dozens of warships to the hated British.

So one day they scuttled their ships! That’s thousands and thousands of tons of steel going deep underwater. Where they have mostly remained.

Decades after that mass sinking came atomic weaponry, which included lots of testing by the nuclear powers. This caused a reaction to most of the worlds iron deposits, affected by all the radiation going into the atmosphere from the testing.

But not the sunken German fleet, a rare source of steel insulated from the testing by being so deep underwater. This made that steel incredibly useful for the manufacture of devices that need to be uncontaminated by radiation, such as Geiger counters.

I assume this is what inspired Cussler’s story.

Here’s note on the above. The steel is referred to as “low background.”

note = more

R51 I really miss the use of miniature models for special effects in filmmaking. Much better than the cartoonish CGI crap they use today.

Still, that scene is so PREPOSTEROUS LOL

R55 agreed, it looks fantastic! Stupid music, but just amazing.

Watching the clip of Titanic being towed into New York, I don't know which is more creepy: The fictional raising of a shipwreck in which so many people lost their lives or the real life World Trade Center seen in the background in which so many people lost their lives.

Lucky when they found the front of the ship the letters Titanic were readable and not covered by ten layers of sea critters.

Jason Robards tells the press conference that's all for now gentlemen though there are also lady reporters who have asked him questions.

Why is the rescue team all male? Because the bottom of the ocean is no place for a woman!

This is what we have to do to meet our target date. Why are you shaking your head?

Shaking my head? I'm shaking all over. This is double what we planned!