The end of an era

The end of an era

Titanic film resists any attempts to romanticise passengers' stories

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The end of an era

There are no trysting lovers steaming up windows in Roy Baker's 1958 film on the sinking of the Titanic, and if there were they would be badly out of place. If James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster, Titanic, was an uneasy welding together of a trite across-class-lines romance and a terrific disaster movie, Baker's film more successfully combines the styles of a feature film and a documentary.

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (UK, 1958, b&w, 123 min) directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Kenneth More, Ronald Allen, Anthony Bushell, Robert Ayres, Honor Blackman and John Merivale. In English with optional English subtitles. Extras include a 60-minute documentary on the making of the film, a 55-minute BBC documentary on the iceberg that sank the Titanic, a half-hour Swedish television documentary about the sinking, an extended archival interview with Titanic survivor Eva Hart, and a commentary track by Don Lynch and Ken Marschall, authors of the book, Titanic, An Illustrated History . A Criterion Region A Blu-ray disc, also available as a Region 1 DVD.

The recent passing of the 100th anniversary of its sinking unleashed a torrent of Titanic-related material in every medium. Cameron rereleased his Titanic movie in lab-conjured 3D, and Criterion, who originally made Baker's film available on DVD in the late 1990s, have remastered it beautifully for Blu-ray.

In making A Night To Remember, Baker and the film's producer William MacQuitty had advantages that have kept it from dating in a destructive way.

First of these was the screenplay by Eric Ambler, who based it on Walter Lord's book, A Night To Remember, still arguably the best ever written about the disaster. Lord, who helped with the film, had had access to many Titanic survivors and carefully recorded their accounts.

Some of these same people also advised the filmmakers on the production (a prefatory note to the movie acknowledges the assistance of Captain Grattidge, O.B.E., who was 4th officer of the Titanic, and of many survivors of the disaster who recalled their personal experiences).

Ambler resisted any attempt to juice up or romanticise their stories. He constructed his screenplay from short episodes and vignettes featuring different passengers and crew members of the Titanic and of the other ships that were involved in the disaster.

Although the central point of view is that of the Titanic's second officer Charles Herbert Lightoller as he becomes aware of the gravity of the situation and reacts, he does not dominate the story. Its growing tension comes from the reactions of a large cast of characters, almost all based on actual passengers.

The familiar facts of the event _ the missed warnings, the shortage of lifeboats, the nearby ship failing to understand what was happening to the Titanic, and the final, belated arrival of the Carpathia _ are threaded through these narratives.

Baker so carefully avoids melodrama that when the movie does become overtly emotional, as in the scenes when the musicians from the first class dining room go down with the sinking ship while playing and singing the hymn, Nearer, My God, To Thee as survivors adrift in lifeboats spontaneously utter prayers in their various languages, it is tempting to see these things as intrusions of cinematic sentimentality from a time when movies were less smugly cynical than they are now, until we remember survivors' reports they really happened.

Small incidents, a wealthy woman returning to her flooding stateroom at the very last moment to retrieve her lucky toy pig while leaving her jewels untouched, a male passenger having to say a quick goodbye to his wife and small children, knowing that he will never see them again, are shown in an understated, almost casual way that makes them all the more moving.

Geoffrey Unsworth's black and white cinematography, which allows actual footage from the launching of the Titanic to be incorporated into the film, harmonises perfectly with Baker's matter-of-fact style.

In a documentary included on the disc, producer MacQuitty says that the reason that the Titanic disaster has been so much more vividly remembered than the sinking of, say, the Lusitania, is that it marked the end of an era in which class social classes were ironclad and inviolable. There are times when the film hammers away at this point a little relentlessly.

At the beginning we see a chilly and cheerless upper-class couple leaving their noble home, fussed over by servants, en route to the waiting Titanic. This is followed by a happier scene of middle class passengers leaving for the voyage, and finally a really jovial farewell being given to a group of Irish passengers who will certainly be travelling in steerage. There is also a good deal of cutting back and forth onboard between the sniffy privileged passengers in first class and the less inhibited, singing and dancing poor below deck. One steerage scene is such a jamboree that it calls up memories of Harpo and Chico Marx blowing the roof off third class in A Night At The Opera.

Considering that the budget for A Night To Remember must have been smaller than the coffee fund for Cameron's Titanic, the scenes of the sinking ship at the end are amazingly effective.

The included making-of documentary shows how water tanks, models, and other relatively inexpensive props and methods were used, but only rarely do the technical shortcomings of half a century ago become evident (a few halos around figures in process shots).

Many of the scenes that use models are so brief that there is not time to check them for inconsistencies. The sinking itself does not show the Titanic breaking in half, as it does so spectacularly in Cameron's film, as that fact only became known during the 1990s when the actual ship was located on the ocean floor and examined. But neither do Baker and Ambler perpetrate the absurdities of the later film _ characters walking chest-deep in floodwater inside the ship without so much as a shiver, only to promptly freeze to death upon contact with the same water outside, and so on.

A Night To Remember is still the best of the many movies made about the sinking of the Titanic, and Criterion's new remastering, especially the Blu-ray edition, lets you appreciate every carefully considered detail. I ordered my copy from amazon.com.

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