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RAISE THE TITANIC opens. Directed by Jerry Jameson replacing original director Stanley Kramer who walks two weeks into the shoot. Adapted from Clive Cussler's best-selling 1976 novel by a revolving door of some seventeen writers (Eric Hughes and Adam Kennedy end up with final screencredit), the story centers on a crack US government operative tasked with overseaing the mammoth job of locating and raising the legendary Titanic from its watery grave in order to recover boxes of a rare fissionable mineral which the ship was reportedly carrying. Despite a promising premise, competent special effects and a high-end cast - Sir Alec Guinness, Jason Robards, Anne Archer, M.Emmett Walsh - the film is effectively knee-capped by a profusion hackneyed, extraneous sub-plots, and its box-office prompts producer Lord Grade to remark that, in hindsight, it probably would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic..
