Movie Review

Rescue at Sea is a well-made documentary film that takes full advantage of an inherently dramatic event to tell an engrossing tale of a 1909 collision between two ships carrying some fifteen thousand passengers and how disaster was prevented by the use of the new technology of radio. Like many of the films in the American Experience series on PBS, Rescue at Sea is very successful at telling the story of the collision and rescue. While generally doing an admirable job of setting the historical context for this collision and the role that radio played in the rescue, it is less successful in dealing with the subtleties and ambiguities of the subsequent debate over the use of radio as a safety feature on ships.

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In the course of sixty minutes, Ben Loeterman, who wrote, directed, and produced this film, makes effective use of a mix of historic images, modern reenactments, quotations from historic documents, and interviews with historians and the descendants of those involved to bring this event to life and give a flavor of the historical context within which it unfolded. As in any historical work Loeterman is constrained by the sources at his disposal, which become even more important in a film, where the narrative is by necessity reliant on visual and sound sources. Thus, we view the event largely through the eyes of the wealthy passengers (and their descendants) who were traveling on the Republic headed for European vacations rather than through the eyes of the unnamed (except for the cabin boy) Italian immigrants on the Florida who were forced by the Italian government to emigrate to the United States after one of the most devastating earthquakes in history.

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