The Memory of Eva Ryker

Donald A. Stanwood’s original novel The Memory of Eva Ryker used the Titanic tragedy as its launching pad. This made-for-TV adaptation of Stanwood’s book moved the action up some 27 years, motivating its plotline with the torpedoing of an Athenia-type luxury liner in 1939. The film flashes forward to 1961: millionaire Ralph Bellamy, who lost his wife when the ship went down, hires writer Robert Foxworth (a discredited ex-cop) to investigate the sinking. Bellamy’s grown daughter Natalie Wood, who’d survived the ordeal, seems to hold the secret, but she’s been in a near-lunatic state for over twenty years. When several other survivors of the sinking are murdered, it becomes all the more crucial to unlock Wood’s pent-up memories. In the tradition of Brian De Palma’s Obsession (75), Natalie Wood not only plays the title role of Eva Ryker, but also Eva’s ill-fated mother. The Memory of Eva Ryker was produced by “master of disaster” Irwin Allen., Natalie Wood in this tale about the survivors of a sunken luxury liner. Robert Foxworth, Ralph Bellamy, Bradford Dillman, Morgan Fairchild, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Peter Graves, Roddy McDowall. Directeüd by Walter Grauman., Drama starring Ralph Bellamy. An eccentric billionaire, an author, a beautiful woman: three lives linked by the tragic sinking of the Titanic and the fragile memories of a ten-year-old.