Above: Jason Robards, David Selby and Richard Jordan inspect history's most famous sunken ship.

'Titanic' is tailor-made for TV

     RAISE THE TITANIC! -- Lord Grade presents a Martin Starger production starring Jason Robards, Richard Jordan, David Selby, Anne Archer and Alec Guinness.  Produced by William Frye, Directed by Jerry Jameson.  At the Sack Cinema 57.  Rated PG

By Bruce McCabe
Globe Staff

     "Raise The Titanic!" is a $35-million television movie that is being shown theatrically while en route to its small-screen destination.
     The movie is a misconceived, anticlimactic, wooden, phlegmatically paced and waterlogged travelogue that devotes so much time to its nautical machinery that there's one left over for even an approximation of interaction among the actors.  The sole justification for the enterprise is a slow-motion sequence that shows the legendary liner being blown out of its water grave.  It's not enough.
     "Titanic" appears to be, like most television, thrown together by someone with one eye on a stopwatch.  Scenarist Adam Kennedy's script requires massive chunks of expositional dialogue -- they're just speeches actually -- and frantic cutting back and forth between land and sea, above and below the water.  Many of the plot developments are embarrassingly predictable, almost on the level of the Saturday matinee serial.  The tedium is not relieved by a mild twist at the end.

     The movie is about an attempt to raise the famous ship that collided with an iceberg at the Grand Banks, Newfoundland, just before midnight April 14, 1912, and sank the next day to the bottom of the North Atlantic, taking 1500 passengers with it.  The premise is surprisingly lacking in suspense.  The movie endeavors to lend itself an air of urgency by layering in a convoluted and often incomprehensible scenario about the ship carrying a mineral that both the Untied States and the Soviet Union want for strategic purposes.  The scenario is no extraneous that it's forgotten once the marine researchers dive into the ocean to look for the missing liner.  When she is recovered, the scenario is revived briefly and then discarded for good.

     Actors don't thrive in the atmosphere of movies like this.  The chief casualty is Jason Robards, a distinguished actor who impersonates a retired admiral.  Robards is required to squint a lot while barking improbably lines that can be heard any night of the week on television's action-adventure programming.  Richard Jordan's character is given the slightest coloration and Jordan works heroically to breathe some believable life into it.  David Selby is defeated by the sheer one-dimensionality of his role.  The actors are never given time to develop their characters.  Their function is strictly utilitarian.  They have to advance the action.
     What the creators of movies like "Titanic" don't understand is that the obsession with action for its own sake is precisely what is killing television now -- and what will kill feature films if they persist in aping TV's appalling habits.  Feature films will survive as an entity unto themselves only if they retain and impart a sophistication about narrative that television has sadly forsaken.  Feature films can't imitate television even when they try to trivialize themselves the way this film does.  The large screen is too compelling for the feature film.  It magnifies.  When the feature film tries to shrink to television size as "Titanic" does, the effort is outlandish, ridiculous.  It's embarrassing.