One plot line relates two schoolteachers, Lawrence Beesley and the fictional Leigh Goodwin, as they hesitantly become involved in a romantic interest in the other.
In steerage, the plot focuses on the experiences of eight Irish immigrants, who are board the ship from a tender in the harbor of Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland. These characters, all based on real people, include Katie Gilnagh, Kate Mullens, Mary Agatha Glynn, Bridget Bradley, Daniel Buckley, Jim Farrell, Martin Gallagher, and David Charters. During the voyage, Martin Gallagher falls for an unnamed "Irish beauty".
Helen Mirren has a small role as Mary Sloan, a real-life surviving Titanic stewardess.[2]
Production
The film was greenlit by Bernard Delfont of EMI Films, at the same time as Delfont's brother, Sir Lew Grade, was making a film based on Raise the Titanic.[3] Delfont says Grade was upset about this and asked his brother to stop production but Delfont refused as it was too late. He wrote he consoled "myself with the thought that the market was big enough for the both of us. It was an expensive miscalculation. SOS Titanic and Raise the Titanic were disaster movies in every sense."[4]
Producer William Filmore called it the "thinking man's disaster film".[5]
Filming
The RMSQueen Mary, which in the movie was partly used as the RMS Titanic
Several of the scenes on the exterior decks, as well as those in the ship's wheelhouse, were filmed on board the later British ocean liner from the 1930s, the retired RMSQueen Mary in Long Beach, California.[5]
S.O.S. Titanic was originally broadcast as a television film on ABC on September 23, 1979. It ran for 3 hours, or approximately 144 minutes, excluding commercials. Although this version was shown on TV occasionally and bootleg copies sometimes surfaced on the internet, it was never commercially released until making its debut on home video from Kino Lorber on October 13, 2020, as both a Blu-ray and a two-disc DVD set along with the European theatrical version.[6][7]
Reception
One reviewer gave the film three out of five stars.[8] DVD Talk praised the movie for its tension building, haunting imagery and immersiver sound design. It also notes that the film attempts a nonjudgmental portrayal of Ismay compared to other films about the disaster. [9] Reviewer Glenn Erickson notes that the film depicts an authentically Irish group of shipboard acquaintances and felt the film to be impressive, in spite of its flaws.[10]
Titanic experts Fitch, Layton and Wormstedt describe the film as stunning, overlaid by a tremendous score by Howard Blake and noted:
[The film]...also sported a bold and very effective method of telling the tragic story: through a flashback.[11]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
