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Tuesday, August 4, 2020

RAISE THE TITANIC (1980)

Hits in print/bywords for Hollywood hubris on the screen, only two of Clive Cussler’s nautically-inclined Dirk Pitt adventures have braved film transfer: this fiasco, aquiver at the thought of becoming a new James Bond franchise*, and SAHARA/’05 (not seen here), which generated more news in post-release legal wrangling than in audience response.  (Losing $150 mill can do that.)   Plenty of blame to go around in RAISE, a typically undercooked Lord Lew Grade project (he wasn’t dubbed Lord Low Grade for nothing), from direction to script, even to its John Barry score, recycling a circular theme from his own BLACK HOLE score of last year.  But mainly, it’s the plot, stupid.  Many moon ago, a load of new energy source material, rumored to be more powerful than uranium, went down with The Titanic!  Now, US and Russian governments are out to find the famous sunken liner and the hidden radioactive loot.  But with the located ship too deep for normal search methods, they must Raise the Titanic to . . . well, you get the idea.  Note how a pretty good, not quite starry cast (Jason Robards*, Richard Jordan as Pitt, David Selby, plus Anne Archer & Alec Guinness with nothing to do) pales next to the cast for the similarly aimed HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER/’90 (Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, even Richard Jordan again, many more).  And with so much happening far underwater, the abundance of slo-mo set pieces can lull you to sleep. Helped by John Barry’s circular lullaby.

CONTEST: *The film does anticipate a James Bond film (SPECTRE/’15) in one way, reusing a twist involving a simple word misunderstanding nipped from the only film Alfred Hitchcock ever remade.  Name the film and the twist to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up on your choice of a streamable film.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Lew Grade & John Barry ‘topped’ this (if that’s the word) next year in THE LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER; Robards once more on hand, now as U.S. Grant, to ask ‘ Who was that masked man?’

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