The Sinking of the RMS Titanic and other ships.

[Adam Went]

Hi Jeff,

Very nice summary there.
No Titanic mentions in Poseidon Adventure then? I've seen the film but it's been such a long time that I honestly can't remember....

Merry Christmas to you and all our other fellow maritime enthusiasts.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Mayerling]

Hi all,

Before I forget - may you all have a Merry Christmas / Happy Chanukkah Holiday.

I think that the CJZ miniseries was the one with George C. Scott. Given disaster movies, by the way, Scott also appeared in THE HINDENBURG in 1976. Films dealing with zeppelin disasters are even less than shipwrecks. However, THE COURT MARTIAL OF BILLY MITCHELL with Gary Cooper, Ralph Bellamy, Fred Clark, and Rod Steiger does get involved with the death of Mitchell's friend Captain Zachary Landsdown, of the U.S.S. Shenandoah, which crashed in a thunderstorm in Ohio in 1925. Mitchell's comments about the incident led to his court martial. Oddly enough, as far as I recall, the R 101 disaster of 1930 never got a film, even though a splendid account of it was made by Nevil Shute in his memoir SLIDE-RULE. That would make an interesting film. But look how long it took to make a commercial movie two years back about Amelia Earhart.

[I will add that in one of their sketches, MONTY PYTHON had Napoleon appear as the R 101 in flight.]

Another earlier Gary Cooper film, SOULS AT SEA, deals in part with an actual 1841 case, the sinking of the William Brown in the North Atlantic. It is made into a fire at sea in the movie, while in reality the Brown hit an iceberg. What made the film unique was it followed the legal problem that first mate Cooper gets when he has to keep people out of the one lifeboat to save any survivors, and faces manslaughter charges afterwards (which is what happened). The same story was modernized for Tyrone Power in 1957 in the film ABANDON SHIP! or SEVEN WAVES AWAY.

Comparison with Titanic also appears in the film HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT (1937) with Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur, Colin Clive, and Leo Carrillo. The wife of an obsessive shipping tycoon, who is naming his new, world largest liner after her, wants out of her marriage, and he won't do it. In the cliffhanger ending, knowing she and her lover (Boyer) are on board the ship returning to England, Clive insanely orders the Captain by radio to go at full speed through the same area the Titanic was in. It hits an iceberg as a result, and the fate of 2,000 passengers are at stake. By the way, the first name of the tycoon is Bruce, Bruce Vail.

Jeff

[Adam Went]

Louisa:

Fading memory in my old age but I believe there's a voice recording of Lightoller in existence somewhere?

One of my father's favourite films was "Reach For The Sky", which came out at a similar time as A Night To Remember IIRC and featured Kenneth More in the role of Douglas Barder, the disabled air ace.....it is a brilliant story actually.

Cheers,
Adam.

[louisa]

In those days Kenneth More was cast as the hero of most British films.

Lightoller would have been surprised to hear himself being portrayed with an upper class English accent though (Lightoller had a west country accent).

[Adam Went]

Louisa:

Shame he didn't quite live long enough to see A Night To Remember, as Kenneth More was probably the lead character in that film, portraying him...

I have a feeling that i've heard Joseph Boxhall (4th officer) was an advisor to the film though.

Always feel really sorry for Fred Fleet, tragic end he had....

Cheers,
Adam.

[louisa]

Sorry to sound like a bighead but I knew that. Lightoller had also led a very colourful life before his Titanic days.

[Adam Went]

Kensei:

All the more so because there's still quite a lot of people out there who would remember the Andrea Doria and may even have sailed on her, unlike the famous wrecks from 40 odd years prior to that. Perhaps there's been an Italian movie made about her (not that i'm aware of, but you never know...).

Errata:

No doubt it's been mentioned before but Second Officer Lightoller of the Titanic was of course involved with his own boat in the Dunkirk rescue....

Cheers,
Adam.

[Errata]

I'm always rather surprised that their isn't a whole movie bout Dunkirk out there (That isn't a documentary or a docudrama). It's shown up a couple of times, but that whole story deserves more than 5 minutes.

[kensei]

I think a movie about the Andrea Doria would be quite good, and that the revelation that a young girl who'd been ripped out of her bed by the collision was found unconscious but still alive in the damaged prow of the Stockholm would carry some particular and poignant shock value on the screen.

[Adam Went]

Hi Jeff,

The first film with David Warner was "SOS Titanic" from 1979 - not a terrible film but the picture quality itself was appalling for some reason - watching it, particularly the outside shots, one struggles to make out what's going on.

Was the CZJ mini-series the same one with George C. Scott as Captain Smith?

Let's also not forget the musical from the 60's, "The Unsinkable Molly Brown", with Debbie Reynolds.

Very good point as well about the more "famous" shipwrecks perhaps covering up notice of the less well known boats but those who also suffered hefty loss of life. I remember being astounded at the fact that there was such a heavy loss of life on the S.S. Princess Alice on the Thames in 1878 (which of course is linked to the JTR case), which went down in just four minutes - and yet there was seemingly so little interest or knowledge on her these days.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Mayerling]

I would think that the reason nobody has made movies about other ships that sank is because - despite the loss of life - no other 'sinking ship story' has the romantic elements of the Titanic on her maiden voyage.

The timeline of events leading up to the loss of the Titanic, the people involved, the dramatic event itself and the aftermath - are all elements that have captured peoples' imaginations and continue to do so.

No other sinking comes close.

Hi Louisa,

Actually you are probably right about the event and setting and characters just being right. Nine times those lost on the TITANIC were lost in the Nazi steamer Wilhelm Gusloff in January 1945, but despite the huge numbers of wives and children drowned the fact that so many were in the Nazi Government's operations in conquered eastern territories (and probably involved in the Final Solution) certainly makes total sympathy for the dead impossible.

Jeff

[louisa]

I would think that the reason nobody has made movies about other ships that sank is because - despite the loss of life - no other 'sinking ship story' has the romantic elements of the Titanic on her maiden voyage.

The timeline of events leading up to the loss of the Titanic, the people involved, the dramatic event itself and the aftermath - are all elements that have captured peoples' imaginations and continue to do so.

No other sinking comes close.

[Mayerling]

Adam, thank you for the sitation on the Slocum in Encyclopedia Titanica. Quite interesting.

Oddly enough the Slocum tragedy on the East River, near North Brother Island, in June 1904 (it is mentioned in James Joyce's ULYSSES, which occurs in Dublin on the next day), has managed to hide a tragedy on the Hudson at Hoboken in 1900 that killed several hundred German crew members when three liners caught on fire. I don't think that any book on that was ever written (although there are at least two on the Slocum, two on the Sultana, one on the Eastland, and many on the Titanic, the Lusitania, the Empress, the Morro Castle, and the Andrea Doria.

Jeff

[Mayerling]

Hi Jeff,

For all the carnage it caused, the attacks on Pearl Harbour missed a lot of key targets and did not fully utilise the element of surprise - I watched a docco last week where it stated how furious and upset Admiral Yamamoto was with this - while his fellow officers were celebrating a "successful" mission, he was brooding over what might have been.

As for the Titanic films, I actually kind of liked 1980's "Raise The Titanic", despite the fact that it's panned by most. And do you remember the mini-series from 1996 starring Catherine Zeta-Jones? Most people have forgotten about it already because:

a.) It was awful; and
b.) It came out literally months before Cameron's blockbuster which totally overshadowed it

There was a film made once about Britannic - named the same and from around 2000 or 2001, I think. I saw it once and refused to watch it again, it's barely even remotely factual and is just generally rubbish right the way through and devotes about 10 minutes at the end of the film to the actual sinking.

Naturally there'll be more Titanic films coming out on and around the centenary.

Funny you should mention General Slocum.....an acquaintance of mine, Jim Kalafus, has written an interesting and in depth account relating to that. Here's the link if you'd like to have a read:

http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/general-slocum.html

Cheers,
Adam.

Hi Errata and Adam,

Errata is right - the film is MANHATTAN MELODRAMA with Gable, Loy, Wiliam Powell, and Thomas Jackson (the actor who usually played cops - here a crooked one - Jackson is best recalled as the Police Detective who finally nails Edward G. Robinson in LITTLE CAESAR). The fim begins with the burning of the Slocum (Quite well done). It is an odd film - not one of the greatest of MGM films of the 1930s - but has a number of trivia points in it. Besides mentioning the Slocum, it was the film that brought Dillinger out of hiding (he loved Myrna Loy films) to the Biograph Theater in Chicago, where he was set up by "the lady in red" and gunned down in an alley. There is a nightclub number in it with a tune by Rogers and Hart - the tune's words later were changed and it became a standard (I'm sorry I can't recall the tune's name). It was the second or third film Powell and Loy appeared in together, and the next one was THE THIN MAN.

Adam mentions a two-parter with Catherine Zita Jones. I think the actor who was Dr. Frankenheimer in THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW film was in this movie too. David Warner, who appeared as the villain's valet in Cameron's TITANIC was in an earlier film in the late 1970s with Ian Holm as J. Bruce Ismay. There was also a Titanic television film with George C. Scott as Captain Smith.

I saw the "Britannic" film - it was okay but no more. You Tube has the sinking scene in several excerpts.

It's not quite the same thing, but the Tay River Bridge Disaster of December 1879 appears in HATTER'S CASTLE with a sleezy Emlyn Williams being one of the victims.

Jeff

[Adam Went]

Hi Jeff,

For all the carnage it caused, the attacks on Pearl Harbour missed a lot of key targets and did not fully utilise the element of surprise - I watched a docco last week where it stated how furious and upset Admiral Yamamoto was with this - while his fellow officers were celebrating a "successful" mission, he was brooding over what might have been.

As for the Titanic films, I actually kind of liked 1980's "Raise The Titanic", despite the fact that it's panned by most. And do you remember the mini-series from 1996 starring Catherine Zeta-Jones? Most people have forgotten about it already because:

a.) It was awful; and
b.) It came out literally months before Cameron's blockbuster which totally overshadowed it

There was a film made once about Britannic - named the same and from around 2000 or 2001, I think. I saw it once and refused to watch it again, it's barely even remotely factual and is just generally rubbish right the way through and devotes about 10 minutes at the end of the film to the actual sinking.

Naturally there'll be more Titanic films coming out on and around the centenary.

Funny you should mention General Slocum.....an acquaintance of mine, Jim Kalafus, has written an interesting and in depth account relating to that. Here's the link if you'd like to have a read:

http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/general-slocum.html

Cheers,
Adam.