Eric Paddon
Member
After decades of knowing about this novel, I finally got around to reading it. Written in 1978 by Donald Stanwood, "Memory of Eva Ryker" is set in a fictional 1962 and involves the Titanic in that (1) we have an expedition to find and recover artifacts headed by an eccentric billionaire whose wife was lost on the ship and who's six year old daughter survived but was left traumatized and (2) the efforts to get the now 56 year old Eva Ryker to recall her suppressed memories and how they tie in to a pair of murders involving Titanic survivors in 1941 and some new murders taking place in this fictional 1962.
Because the Titanic had yet to be found at the time this novel was written, Stanwood had the freedom to imagine a Titanic being found in 1962 in which in his description the ship is intact and lying on her starboard side (concealing the "gash" damage), and where it becomes for purposes of the plot, possible for a sealed cannister of 16mm film to be found on the wreck that just happens to provide a key to the whole matter of what Eva Ryker went through! The second part of the novel in which Eva is placed under hypnosis allows the flashback on the Titanic to unfold in greater detail. Stanwood's grasp of Titanic history for what was known in the 1970s is credible though not perfect.
The novel was made into a TV-movie in 1980 produced by Irwin Allen and starring Natalie Wood in the dual role of Eva Ryker and her mother in the flashback sequences. But out of logistical necessity, the sunken ship is no longer the Titanic. Instead, we have a story that takes place in 1970 and the sinking is the fictional liner "Queen Anne" that is torpedoed and sunk just as WW2 breaks out (scenes shot on the "Queen Mary" just like "SOS Titanic"). The reasons for this change have more to do with structural convenience. First, by having the events take place only 30 years earlier, this means the Eva Ryker of the present can be the still young and glamorous Natalie Wood and not the near 60 year old character of the novel and it can also allow for a budding romance with the story's main character doing the investigating played by Robert Foxworth (who in the novel is a married man and nearly twenty years younger). The novel ends up being faithful in terms of its main story, it's just that for practical structural reasons it can no longer involve the Titanic.
This was the last project Natalie Wood did that was finished in her lifetime as her last movie "Brainstorm" wasn't finished at the time of her death. There is a very eerie foreshadowing of her real-life demise when we see her as Clare Ryker dead and floating face-down in a flooding stateroom during the "Queen Anne" sinking (sinking footage was cannibalized chiefly from the 1960 movie "The Last Voyage").
Because the Titanic had yet to be found at the time this novel was written, Stanwood had the freedom to imagine a Titanic being found in 1962 in which in his description the ship is intact and lying on her starboard side (concealing the "gash" damage), and where it becomes for purposes of the plot, possible for a sealed cannister of 16mm film to be found on the wreck that just happens to provide a key to the whole matter of what Eva Ryker went through! The second part of the novel in which Eva is placed under hypnosis allows the flashback on the Titanic to unfold in greater detail. Stanwood's grasp of Titanic history for what was known in the 1970s is credible though not perfect.
The novel was made into a TV-movie in 1980 produced by Irwin Allen and starring Natalie Wood in the dual role of Eva Ryker and her mother in the flashback sequences. But out of logistical necessity, the sunken ship is no longer the Titanic. Instead, we have a story that takes place in 1970 and the sinking is the fictional liner "Queen Anne" that is torpedoed and sunk just as WW2 breaks out (scenes shot on the "Queen Mary" just like "SOS Titanic"). The reasons for this change have more to do with structural convenience. First, by having the events take place only 30 years earlier, this means the Eva Ryker of the present can be the still young and glamorous Natalie Wood and not the near 60 year old character of the novel and it can also allow for a budding romance with the story's main character doing the investigating played by Robert Foxworth (who in the novel is a married man and nearly twenty years younger). The novel ends up being faithful in terms of its main story, it's just that for practical structural reasons it can no longer involve the Titanic.
This was the last project Natalie Wood did that was finished in her lifetime as her last movie "Brainstorm" wasn't finished at the time of her death. There is a very eerie foreshadowing of her real-life demise when we see her as Clare Ryker dead and floating face-down in a flooding stateroom during the "Queen Anne" sinking (sinking footage was cannibalized chiefly from the 1960 movie "The Last Voyage").
