A Night to Remember (1958)

Roy Baker made this extraordinarily fine film about the sinking of the Titanic in the style of a documentary. Although it has a large cast it has no real stars, except perhaps Kenneth More who was a star in Britain at the time. He is an officer on the ship and is the central, linking character. Constrained by budgetary considerations the film used models but the cutting and the matte-work are so fine you are seldom aware of this. The tragedy engulfs you and the tragedy is of epic proportions. The stories of individual passengers come to the fore and the naturalistic acting of the cast make these stories very moving. The film is an honest tear-jerker in a way American movies never can be. It shows the florid, flabby and bloated James Cameron movie up for what it is.

Fmovies: The original adaptation of the "Ship of Dreams", 'A Night to Remember' is a riveting and emotional study of the fateful maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. A British production made on location at Pinewood Studios, Roy Baker's meticulous re-creation of the sinking of the Titanic is an utter masterpiece of cinema. The scale of the sets, the ingenuity of the visual effects and the stellar performances all make this a 1950's Brit-blockbuster at its very best. Whilst the '97 adaptation from James Cameron is a powerful piece of cinema, this stunning and melodramatic 1958 flick spends its 2-hour duration focussing on the lives of everybody aboard the ship instead of wandering off to study a love story between two characters. A film that relies on real-life survivor testimony, 'A Night to Remember' is in my opinion the best adaptation of the tale of the "unsinkable" ship and one of the best British films to have ever graced the screen.

Three years ago I wrote comments on the 1997 James Cameron film "Titanic" for this database. Either because of the number of Oscars collected by this film, or its fantastic production cost of some two hundred million dollars, I felt ashamed when reporting that I found it to be a most uncomfortable combination of a historical documentary and an entirely fictional romance. I found it hard to understand why such a major film should have been split between two such disparate styles of presentation. Although I had recognised that several scenes in Cameron's "Titanic" appeared to have been directly copied from the excellent 1979 TV film "S.O.S. Titanic", I did not feel this was adequate to explain the strongly documentary flavour of so many other sequences. All was explained very recently when, thanks to TCM, I had an opportunity to see "A Night to Remember" for the first time. This is an almost completely documentary 1958 film based on a very thoroughly researched and near definitive book of the same name that was prepared from the testimony given at the official enquiries in the U.K. and the U.S.A., and written by Dr. Walter Lord.. Much of Cameron's film was also documentary and appears to have been directly based on this much earlier film, the remainder was a romantic drama that was essentially incompatible. Cameron probably decided on this approach because ANTR, with no well known stars in the cast, failed to achieve the same success in the U.S.A. as in the U.K. I can now understand that featuring the romance in the way which Cameron did was probably intended to enable his film to create a greater degree of viewer involvement with the unfortunate passengers on the liner and so help to avoid this problem. Unfortunately in my view the documentary and the fictional parts of his film never melded.

These comments on the more recent film are necessary before I can meaningfully report my impressions when watching ANTR Although filmed in monochrome and created with a much more modest budget, ANTR is a film that I will find it very hard to forget. Characterisation of both the passengers and crew seemed to me to be spot on, there were none of the occasional caricatures which jarred so severely in the later film. The drama of the events was left to speak for itself and this created a much more powerful film. The three aspects of the Titanic disaster which have gripped public interest so strongly for almost a century are the sudden impact on a community of 2,000 ordinary people from all stations in life as they gradually realize that they probably only have another hour to live, the impact of the rigid class structures of the period on the way in which this situation was handled both by the passengers concerned and by those in authority, and the enormous number of "what if?" questions that the disaster raised (such as what effect pressure to win the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing may have had on the seamanship shown by the officers). All three of these aspects are fully featured in the film, but often in quite subtle ways, and none is given excessive weight. The camera-work and attention to details of presentation, such as the creaking and groaning from the tortured ship, are truly outstanding. Special effects in the 1997 film are admittedly much superior (after all $200 million must buy something!), but those in ANTR are quite advanced for its time and are more than adequate to prevent any serious jarring notes from arising as the film is viewed. Ultimately a film h

A Night to Remember fmovies. I've seen several film versions of the Titanic tragedy (I'm something of a buff--I'm distantly related to Mr. & Mrs. Edwin Kimball, who were 1st class passengers!) "A Night to Remember" is still the best, no contest. The effects are 1958 state-of-the-art, the script was meticulously researched, and the people are actually written and played as 1912 people (James Cameron's cast were a bit too much 1990's to be convincing). Even those characters who are slightly fictionalized (the "lady" who represents--without mentioning--Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, and "my dear son" and his family, for examples) behave as their real life counterparts would have in 1912, giving the film a documentary feel without failing to give the viewer people to identify with and care about. This is classic film-making at its finest!

Including the very first movie that dealt with the Titanic disaster, SAVED FROM THE TITANIC (1912) starring Dorothy Gibson, an actual survivor who wore the same outfit in the movie that she had on that fateful night just a few months earlier, there have been TEN movies made covering the sinking, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, based on Walter Lords' ultimate reference work of the same name, was the 6th. The film has no equal! For those who are interested, the other nine ARE chronologically:

TITANIC (1915) TITANIC: DISASTER IN THE ATLANTIC (1929) TITANIC (1943) TITANIC (1953) A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1958) SOS TITANIC (1979) TITANIC (1984) TITANIC (1996) TITANIC (1997)

The REASON that A NIGHT TO REMEMBER excels, is that it is a straight up docudrama of the event. Historical accuracy (lets forget the "split,"... although actually "suggested" by a few eye-witnesses at the time, it was believed the ship had foundered intact) was observed, the main characters were vastly better portrayed than in later films and the "scale" of the disaster far more keenly felt, for all James Cameron's $180 million! Kenneth More made an unimprovable-upon Captain Lightoller and Laurence Naismith simply WAS Captain Smith. (The less said about Bernard Hill's loopy characterization in Cameron's epic, the better!) Those who wish to compare multi million dollar digitization to that which was available in 1958 need to get REAL and for all that money, and exciting as Cameron's was - it just didn't either LOOK or feel anything more than, well...a massive film-set! The 1958 version went to the heart of the tragedy...and took the viewer with them. A NIGHT TO REMEMBER will remain a tribute...THE tribute to that night of madness. Little things, David McCallum fighting for his life-vest, Michael Goodliffe as Thomas Andrews - dignity personified waiting for his last moments, the drunken cook - they were all worth more than $100 million dollars worth of fx! You can't BUY credibility. This could never have been an American tale - it didn't work with the 1953 Barbara Stanwyck version and it didn't ring true for Cameron (good though it was as a movie rather than as the tragedy!) Did anyone notice dear old "Q" (Desmond Llewelyn) below decks and old Brit-turned-Aussie favorite Stuart Wagstaff, as a steward in Steerage?

Based on the Walter Lord novel of the same name, A Night to Remember is far and away the most definitive and honest telling of this famous and world-shaking disaster. Flaws it may have, but these largely revolve around a lack of special effects technology available at the time, and a lack of historical evidence due the fact the wreck had not yet been discovered. Despite these minor quibbles, the film is probably the only one to loyally adhere to telling the truth about what happened that night; and it does so in a most compelling way.

Unlike the smartingly awful James Cameron schlock boiler, ANTR doesn't pack a spectacular special effects punch - but nor does it pack a spectacularly corny and improbable love story concocted with teenagers in mind. The producers of ANTR understood that you didn't need a fictitious love story to heighten the tragedy of that night - the bitter irony of the real events sufficed.

And it is this irony and tragedy that the filmmakers brought out absorbingly well. The comprehensive book by Walter Lord was consulted down to the letter; so the story is told as authentically as possible. With a great script involving mainly real historical characters, perfect casting, and performances that show the actors were engrossed in their roles, the film really does shine. The snappy, economical directing is both proof of the lack of pretensiousness of the producers, as well as being extremely effective in bringing out the meaning in each scene. This makes for intelligent and gripping viewing.

Watch out for the poignant scenes in which the crew attempt to contact the nearby Californian to no avail, and Captain Smith walks to the railing and implores God to help them; the scene where the Captain calls "every man for himself", then walks into the wheelhouse just before it dips underwater; and the gripping scene in which Thomas Andrews (the Titanic's designer), a broken man, waits in the smoking room for the end, determined to go down with his creation. All these scenes are powerful, authentic and sincere; scenes in which all the various emotions aroused by such a disaster are brought out very clearly and movingly.

The special effects, although not so brilliant for today, were fantastic for the times; half the ship was actually constructed for life-size shooting, and a large model was also built, complete with miniature little row boats featuring motorised oars, for the long shots. So the maximum effort was made to make as realistic a depiction of the disaster as possible. And, in fact, the interior scenes of the ship are perfectly authentic, and the audience feels that they are actually aboard the Titanic. Only in the long shots, where a model was used, does the film look noticeably dated.

So by sticking as close as possible to the survivor's accounts featured in the Walter Lord novel, and by avoiding modern cinematic clichés, A Night to Remember remains the only Titanic film to provide a genuine account of the sinking of the great ship that is not marred by superficial Hollywood garbage. It tells the story, as it happened, of an event that changed mankind's attitudes toward his own creations; and as such, it brings to the screen the full impact of what this disaster really meant to the world in, as mentioned, a very compelling, poignant and honest way. It is a true testament to British film making.

As a footnote, many actual survivors of the Titanic were on set as the film was being made; and the musical pig in the lifeboat scenes was the