The word “Titanic” has perhaps unfortunately become as synonymous with James Camerons’ 1997 epic romance as with the actual world-shaking tragedy itself that claimed the lives of some 1500 people when the extravagant passenger liner struck an iceberg on April 15th 1912. More than any other movie, Titanic has attained a pop cultural capital on par with the historical event it’s based on –the world being far enough away from that disaster now for it to no longer be sacred ground, but not quite so far that this fact isn’t a little bit troubling.
Almost since it came out, Titanic had its detractors, though not usually for this fact or even matters of historical accuracy, as much as for its sentimental romance and gall to become one of the most profitable movies of all time off it. But for those intolerant of such themes or just looking for a different perspective on the Titanic sinking, there was already a movie forty years older to whet that appetite. Plenty of Titanic-inspired movies and T.V. movies had been made before Camerons’, including a silent film starring one of the survivors made only a month after the event (in very poor taste), and a Nazi propaganda film in which the Titanic sunk due to western capitalism and a lone German hero saves many passengers left to die by the British (in even poorer taste -though I kinda want to see it). But the most famous and most important was A Night to Remember, a 1958 British film with such a dedication to historical accuracy it’s often more re-enactment than retelling.
The most curious distinction from the later, more famous movie and what makes A Night to Remember a perfect companion piece to it is how it’s told primarily from the point of view of the crew where its successor focused more on the passengers. Thus we’re made aware of every circumstance and stake as the crew is, following their protocol and procedures; and real life figures are the films’ protagonists, most prominently Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the most senior crewman to survive, played with perfect British endurance by Kenneth More. And despite the movies’ rather clinical nature, sticking to the facts and order of events as they were known at the time, the characters are not flat. Part of this is due to how a lot of the accounts and legends surrounding people aboard the Titanic are imbued with personality to begin with (the famous band playing on deck till the bitter end for instance), and the larger than life nature of a few of the notable figures on board, such as Margaret “the Unsinkable Molly” Brown (Tucker McGuire), Archibald Gracie IV (James Dyrenforth) and Edith Russell (Teresa Thorne), as well as the relative freedom the film had in its depiction of composite passengers, keeping things fresh by frequently switching between their points of view and intimate narratives. There are a lot of accounts and a lot of interesting stories to come out of those final hours aboard the Titanic, likewise a reason for why the movie doesn’t waste any time getting to the iceberg: it wants to work in as many of them as it can.
That is essentially what made the nonfiction book it is based on, A Night to Remember by Walter Lord, such a sensation when it was published a few years earlier. It was the first comprehensive work on the disaster in decades, renewing interest in the ship and its catastrophic sinking, and capturing the nostalgia of producer William MacQuitty, who had witnessed first-hand the launch of the Titanic as a child in Belfast. His film, directed by Roy Ward Baker (the A.D. on Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes), was much like Camerons’, a huge endeavour; the most expensive film ever made in the U.K. up to that point, and it really shows. The ship used in the production is magnificent in scale, the sets intricately recreated with opulent grandeur, the open ocean (both constructed within Pinewood Studios and replicated on location at Ruislip Lido) is sublimely atmospheric in its haunting, kenophobic beauty, and a large cast including what look to be over a hundred extras embody fully the films’ bigness, its’ urgency and intense dramatic weight. The event itself is treated with the utmost respect and seriousness, the disaster still being in living memory after all; the modern history-defining scale is conveyed, as much as its aesthetics and imagery have since been adopted by numerous frugal disaster movies since.
A Night to Remember’s commitment to realism extends even to the accounts and actions of the Californian and the Carpathia, the former ship infamous for its inaction while in range and the latter for its rescue of most of the survivors. There’s certainly some dramatic licence taken in its portrait of the Californian’s captain as lazy and dismissive of the Titanic’s rocket firings, but otherwise these sequences retain the same level of documentary focus as the rest of the film with lines of dialogue taken directly from witness recollections.
Of course an abundance of detail can work against a movie too, and A Night to Remember at times comes close to losing something of its human element in its by-the-book storytelling. As fascinating as it may be to see the crew respond to the situation, keeping their wits and candour about them as the terror escalates, it doesn’t arrest you the way seeing helpless passengers responding to the increasingly tumultuous circumstances do. That’s an advantage the Cameron movie has, relaying much more effectively the chaos and horror through characters easier to identify with (A Night to Remember doesn’t spend a lot of time with passengers below second class). The passengers it does focus on are generally rather calm and sensible in light of everything, some of which is rooted in that classical stiff upper lip attitude that is fairly authentic to the Edwardian British, but it certainly doesn’t speak to everyone’s behaviour aboard the Titanic, especially in the sheer chaos of the escape and the controversial nature of the famous “women and children first” policy.
And yet, there’s something intrinsically noble to these choices, the films’ ignorance of some of the intensity and emotional reality not overlooked out of a misguided idea of human nature in the face of such calamity, or even an attempt to downplay the more frightful and fatal aspects of the disaster (as covered before, mainstream British cinema wasn’t as heavily censored as its American counterpart). Rather, honour seems to be the motivating factor here. The movie is concerned with realism no doubt, but also with paying tribute -perhaps the reason it hones in on the crew and their efforts more than the despair of the passengers. It’s to emphasize their heroism, bravery, ingenuity, and empathy. They’re disciplined, but in a wholly respectable, inimitably British way that commands admiration; and that extends to some of the passengers: Mrs. Clarke (Jill Dixon) who opts to stay behind with her husband (Ronald Allen) even in impending death, by contrast Mr. Lucas (John Merivale) assuring the safety of his wife (Honor Blackman) and their children in the knowledge he won’t make it off the boat, and of course the famously formidable courage of Molly Brown, rousing the women of one lifeboat to turn around to pick up survivors. In this the film manages to be both devastating and heartwarming, likewise a tragically grim and vivid recounting of that fateful night, and a celebration of the human spirit that weathered it in the actions and fortitude of the individuals involved.
One of the movies’ most memorable moments, so much so that Cameron ripped it nearly verbatim, is the scene of the ships’ formerly confident designer Thomas Andrews (Michael Goodliffe) resigned and downtrodden in the smoking room, left to stew in his failure as he makes no effort to escape (a scene apparently inspired by popular urban legend). The last of Captain Smith (Laurence Naismith) as well, going “down with the ship” is moving. Neither actor has quite the screen presence that Victor Garber and Bernard Hill would bring to the roles respectively, but each make their last stands utterly poignant. The greatest image this film provides is that of the Titanic sinking, ironically one of the few notable historical inaccuracies, as it’s now known to have split in two before subsiding. However it’s such a striking, poetic sight, the cinematography (by Geoffrey Unsworth, who would go on shoot Cabaret, Superman, and astoundingly, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is remarkably crisp on the flickering lights and their refraction in the water as the vessel gradually goes down. When the last of the ship is beneath the waves the impact feels genuine as Lightoller echoes your sentiments, “…even though it’s happened, it’s still unbelievable. I don’t think I’ll ever feel sure again. About anything.”
Hubris is the most common narrative through the collective consciousness of the Titanic. It was “the unsinkable ship” that sank on its maiden voyage -one of the great horrific cosmic ironies of history. But aside from allusions to that through Lightoller’s declaration, as well as the occasional comment made in the film by figures like Andrews or Smith, A Night to Remember isn’t terribly interested in the oversights that arguably caused the disaster: the interruption of the wireless message warning of icebergs, the weaknesses in the hull, the passivity of the Californian, and the shocking deficiency of lifeboats -though each is addressed. It’s a film more about the gravity of the episode itself, the sheer fact that this happened -that 1500 people perished at sea in such a horrible way; but also that 700 were saved, that heroes were made in the direst circumstances, that human decency could persist even on a sinking ship alone in the middle of the ice-cold ocean.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment