1980 - RAISE THE TITANIC, like the title says.

A big expensive film based on the Clive Cussler book.  Raise The Titanic was also a big failure with critics and the audience.  However this film is a "guilty pleasure" for me.  The logistics of actually raising a sinking ship like the Titanic are fascinating.  The extensive model and miniature work is at a very high level and at times it looks like they actually sailed the Titanic into New York harbor.

The cast is a mixture of excellent film actors like Jason Robards, Richard Jordan and Alec Guiness and lots of television actors such as J. D. Cannon, Bo Brudin and Dirk Blocker.  This is rather unsurprising since the film was directed by Jerry Jameson a filmmaker who usually worked in TV on just about every cop show that ran from the 1960's to the 2000's. Jameson was brought into the project as a replacement for the original director Stanley Kramer.

 

Also in the film is Anne Archer in the very thankless role as the romantic lead, you could have completely cut her scenes and it would not have affected the film in any way

The film has an outstanding score by John Barry and along with the special effects may be the best thing about the film.

The film was written by Adam Kennedy, the running time is 114 minutes.

1975 - THE DEADLY TOWER, a TV movie based on the Charles Whitman shooting spree

This is one of those TV movies that were popular during the 1970's.  These movies would take real life events and dramatize or fictionalize them for the viewing public.  Some of them were OK occasionally they were actually good most of them were terrible.  The Deadly Tower is probably one of the better ones.  This is a dramatization of the Charles Whitman shooting from the Austin University tower in 1966 given the usual fact mixed with fiction treatment as if the actual events weren't dramatic enough.

Kurt Russell who at the time was transitioning from Disney kid actor into more "adult" roles played Whitman.  Back in the good old days of Hollywood, if you wanted to show you weren't typecast as a Disney actor you had to make a 180 degree turn and play either a crazed killer or a sexed up bimbo.  Obviously Russell decided on the killer route.  For a 1970's movie the 2nd lead is a Hispanic actor named Richard Yniguez who was one of the the cops that climbed up into the tower and finally stopped Whitman.  The rest of the cast is a couple of TV perennials, John Forsythe, & Pernell Roberts.  New York actor Clifton James again plays a redneck law enforcement officer and this appears to be an early role for Ned Beatty.

Just the actual situation itself is dramatic enough and this is probably the best part of the film.  Where things run a little off course is in the hokey dramatic events that the story veers down.  The Hispanic cop is passed over for promotion at the police department.  His wife wants him to quit his job and take something less dangerous etc.  This was the kind of stuff they would cram into these films.

This is probably one of the few films to take an anti-gun position.  At one point Forsythe yells at the gun store owner who sold all the guns and ammo to Russell without questioning what he was going to do with it.  Try getting that in a film today.  If there is one thing I am sure of, everyone in Texas probably owns a gun. 

100 minutes

1977 - AIRPORT '77, the 2nd in the Airport trilogy sequels.

This Airport film doesn't really reach the highs of the first zany sequel.  This time they sink the 747 in the Bermuda Triangle which leads to a spectacular rescue sequence courtesy of the United States Navy.

In Airport '77, our past his prime star is Jack Lemmon who actually brings a surprising amount of conviction to the part of heroic pilot Captain Don Gallagher.  Brenda Vaccaro is 2nd billed as his main squeeze.  James Stewart is the millionaire who has placed his substantial art collection on board the 747 which is hijacked by a gang of thieves bent on stealing the collection.

The cast is not really up to the goofy standards of the first film sequel but it does have some interesting actors in it.  Arlene Golonka, Tom Sullivan, Lee Grant, Gil Gerard, Pamela Bellwood, Juanita Moore, Robert Foxworth and George Kennedy again as Joe Patroni although his part is just a glorified cameo.

 

The director victim on this film is Jerry Jameson a television veteran of shows like Ironside, The Six Million Dollar Man and Dallas.  Jameson gets the job done for what this film is, a rip off of a rip off.

Jerry Jameson would probably be an interesting guy to interview, he's really been around.  He was an editor on TV shows like I Spy, Gomer Pyle and That Girl. 

113 minutes, written by Michael Scheff and David Spector.