Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 9. May 4 1981

Film — Rock Bottom — Raise the Titanic

Film

Rock Bottom

Raise the Titanic

Photo of an upside-down car

Scene: Lord Lew Grade's office somewhere in Marble Arch.

Lord Grade: 'By George, a spiffing year, Profits absolutely top hole.'

Financial Wizz-Kid: 'Yeah, boss, but what about the tax you'll have to pay on it?'

Lord Grade: 'Crikey, I never thought of that. I say, isn't there anything we can do about it? Buy a government department, hire the head of MI5, that sort of thing?'

F. W-K: 'Well, boss, the way I look at it, all you have to do is make a phenomenal loss on something, and cut all those excess profits away. After all, it's turnover that's important, anyway.'

L.G.: 'You're a genius, Hal, a genius. I've got just the thing, here on my desk, I've just bought the rights on this novel, called Raise the Titanic. What say we spend millions on special effects, shoot miles and miles of excess footage, and get some great, expensive international talent? Good Lord, we could even hire the American Navy. We could lose a pretty packet.'

F. W-K: 'Yeah, we could torpedo the whole thing.'

L.G.: 'No, no, that was the Lusitania. What we want is an iceberg.'

What other reason could there be for a film this bad? 'Raise the Titanic' plumbs new depths in every direction, falling into a class of sheer abysmalness all of its own. It is interminable, slow, and full of acting so wooden as to make Thunderbirds look like Oscar material. The only one in the cast who has the good sense to camp it up is Sir Alec Guinness, who, in a cameo appearance from behind two large black bushy eyebrows, is so bad as to be hilarious. (Sample of the brilliant script: grizzled old salt surges up to the bar like an Atlantic breaker and demands 'two pink gins, full measure, and don't skimp on the Angostura.')

Plot Digs a Grave

The plot is sheerest humbug, I think,' although most of it seems to have been excised in favour of longwinded gratuitous 'action sequences'. I still can't really work out how, when after an hour and a half they finally get around to it, they manage to talk a couple of thousand tons of very sunken boat into rising to the surface like the proverbial cork, I do know that the plot has something to do with the only existing stock of a mysterious mineral called 'Byzanium' (that's Byzantium minus the 't', Yeats fans). For some reason this is in the storeroom of the Titanic, which is why they bother to raise it at all, only it isn't there, it's somewhere else, as you will have realised about half an hour into the film. In other words, they go to all this trouble for nothing. April fool.

The technical crew should be thrown into the Atlantic trench with weights on their feet. The special effects are patchy to say the least - the title of this article sums most of them up rather well, apart from a rather cute sequence where the boat is towed into New York harbour only seventy years late. The editors, who get top billing after the actors (who you will never have heard of anyway) should be cut themselves, and the photography owes a huge debt to Days of our Lives.

Raise the Titanic is a film I shall treasure always: whenever I am bored by a movie, 'Ah', I will be able to say, 'Ah, but at least it isn't as bad as Raise the Titanic.'

Scene: Same office a year later.

Lord Grade: Boy, you're a genius. We're bankrupt. Pull up a packing-case; mind the rats.

F. W-K: Thanks, boss. Listen, there's something I want to know. Where did the Byzanium go to?

L.G.: Ah well, we had a brilliant idea. If this film worked (which it has, they're staying home in droves), anyway, old man, if this film worked, we'd want to make a sequel and 'torpedo' that, now wouldn't we.'

F. W-K: A sequel? You mean...

L.G.: Yes. Can't you see it? "Lord Grade presents ... Raise the Lusitania". I may vomit.

S.D.