The other comments have restored my love for this film. Like another reviewer I saw it as a kid & never forgot. I saw a world, for the first time, where things could go terribly wrong; Disney never showed me stuff like that. And when things went wrong there were good men pulling together to make it right again. One of them was a black man. A little girl was scared but brave too. The mommy would do anything for her baby & husband to make it.
Twenty odd years later I bought it & took it to our little experimental film group at the county schools. I wanted everybody to see the realism of the approach & the human values. I also wanted them to see what you could accomplish if you took advantage of a unique setting or situation. The Ile De France was on it's way to be scrapped & this was the basis for the film. Nobody would even watch & that really bummed me out. Then I lent it to my good friend Conrad. He was a retired merchant marine officer (second). He said he laughed all the way thru because many things were not exactly realistic. One thing, the stateroom was down inside the ship not up in the superstructure where staterooms are supposed to be; and stuff like that.
Well you know they were WRONG. This is great film-making; a great story well told. Gripping from start to finish. I believe it was titled '90 Minutes to Disaster' when I saw it. I was right. So what if every little fact isn't exact. I will say that the narration is a bit annoying, that is true. When a film is a memorable event in a kid's life (more than one) it's a great film.
I have just finished reading a book called 'Collision Course' by Alvin Moscow about the Stockholm, Andrea Doria disaster in 1956. The script seems to me to contain some interesting echoes from this tragedy; the worst shipping disaster since the Titanic. Not coincidentally the Ile De France was one of the rescue ships on the scene & she was famous for rendering aid in several other shipping disasters.
Twenty odd years later I bought it & took it to our little experimental film group at the county schools. I wanted everybody to see the realism of the approach & the human values. I also wanted them to see what you could accomplish if you took advantage of a unique setting or situation. The Ile De France was on it's way to be scrapped & this was the basis for the film. Nobody would even watch & that really bummed me out. Then I lent it to my good friend Conrad. He was a retired merchant marine officer (second). He said he laughed all the way thru because many things were not exactly realistic. One thing, the stateroom was down inside the ship not up in the superstructure where staterooms are supposed to be; and stuff like that.
Well you know they were WRONG. This is great film-making; a great story well told. Gripping from start to finish. I believe it was titled '90 Minutes to Disaster' when I saw it. I was right. So what if every little fact isn't exact. I will say that the narration is a bit annoying, that is true. When a film is a memorable event in a kid's life (more than one) it's a great film.
I have just finished reading a book called 'Collision Course' by Alvin Moscow about the Stockholm, Andrea Doria disaster in 1956. The script seems to me to contain some interesting echoes from this tragedy; the worst shipping disaster since the Titanic. Not coincidentally the Ile De France was one of the rescue ships on the scene & she was famous for rendering aid in several other shipping disasters.