Something for Thursday

Having the Titanic on the mind for obvious reasons, here’s some music from a movie about the wreck…but not the famous movie. This is the rather less famous movie from 1980 or 1981 called Raise the Titanic. I watched this movie years ago when it was on a mid-afternoon matinee kind of thing, and…well, that’s probably the best way to watch a movie like this. I don’t even remember if I watched it before or after Robert Ballard’s famous discovery of the actual wreck itself, which rendered the movie even more inaccurate than it would have been to begin with. Raise the Titanic‘s plot involves, well, a plan to raise the Titanic from the ocean floor, because there was some kind of cargo that was somehow still very valuable many years later. (All this is from faded memory; I’m not looking it up and I only watched the movie once.) I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal that, yes, they do find the Titanic and raise her from the ocean floor in a big special-effect set-piece.

The music from the movie is by John Barry, who by this point in his career was starting to lean hard into his “big sweeping slow melody” phase that would peak ten years later with Dances With Wolves. Here is a suite from Raise the Titanic.

OK, fine, here’s the actual clip of the ship rising to the surface again. Note that at this point, most people still thought that the ship had sunk in one piece, rather than snapping in two before sinking.

No, I don’t recommend the movie…unless it’s a Sunday afternoon and you have some popcorn handy.

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