This impressionistic documentary captures some of the human element of a disaster at sea.
Forty-six people aboard the SS Andrea Doria were killed that foggy night in July 1956, and with them, seemingly, some of the life force of Capt. Calamai, who drew criticism in the tragedy's aftermath.
Yet, "I never put my needs before my duties," he confides in a dramatized flashback, and he'd have gone down on the luxury liner had his crew not dragged him off. "He was going to die with the ship because he was a man of honor," states narrator/survivor Pierette Simpson, nine years old when lowered to the sea by a rope around her waist.
As the documentary hints and Wikipedia seems to confirm, the ship that smashed Andrea at a 90-degree angle, the Stockholm, might have been off-course -- yet it appears to have been assumed at the time that the Swedes were better sailors than those of Genoa.
Whoever was at fault, the crash "hurled me out of childhood innocence and into a condition of extreme survival," Pierette relates.
The collision was the first major event to be filmed in real time from the air. With memories of the Titanic perhaps still fresh in onlookers' minds, the Andrea was more fortunate in that she foundered near land (off of Cape Cod), numerous ships immediately coursed to her rescue, and she stayed afloat a good 11 hours after impact -- albeit with half of her lifeboats inaccessible due to tilt.
A little quibble with this production is that we get no sense of who the Detroit-bound Pierette grew up to be. She says little about her new life in America or of how she was affected, longer-term, by her childhood trauma.
Forty-six people aboard the SS Andrea Doria were killed that foggy night in July 1956, and with them, seemingly, some of the life force of Capt. Calamai, who drew criticism in the tragedy's aftermath.
Yet, "I never put my needs before my duties," he confides in a dramatized flashback, and he'd have gone down on the luxury liner had his crew not dragged him off. "He was going to die with the ship because he was a man of honor," states narrator/survivor Pierette Simpson, nine years old when lowered to the sea by a rope around her waist.
As the documentary hints and Wikipedia seems to confirm, the ship that smashed Andrea at a 90-degree angle, the Stockholm, might have been off-course -- yet it appears to have been assumed at the time that the Swedes were better sailors than those of Genoa.
Whoever was at fault, the crash "hurled me out of childhood innocence and into a condition of extreme survival," Pierette relates.
The collision was the first major event to be filmed in real time from the air. With memories of the Titanic perhaps still fresh in onlookers' minds, the Andrea was more fortunate in that she foundered near land (off of Cape Cod), numerous ships immediately coursed to her rescue, and she stayed afloat a good 11 hours after impact -- albeit with half of her lifeboats inaccessible due to tilt.
A little quibble with this production is that we get no sense of who the Detroit-bound Pierette grew up to be. She says little about her new life in America or of how she was affected, longer-term, by her childhood trauma.
