My review of and comparison between Titanic and 'A Night To Remember'

My review of and comparison between Titanic and 'A Night To Remember'

A Night To Remember is a 1958 British film based on the RMS Titanic and its maiden voyage from Southhampton to New York City in 1912. At the time, Titanic was the largest machine ever built and regarded by its designers  as "unsinkable" until the morning hours of April 12th 1912 when, plowing ahead at full-speed and ignoring ice-pack warnings from nearby steamers, the Titanic--all 882ft long, 175ft high, and 52,310 tons of her--struck an iceberg on its starboard side, flooded, and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. The film is directed by Roy Ward Baker based on American author John Walter Lord Jr.'s 1955 book of the same name and is produced by William MacQuitty who, as a 6 year old, saw the ship at Belfast. 

If you have not seen this film you should do so to appreciate how well made it is and how it measures up to James Cameron's version made almost 40 years later with the help of CGI and other technologies that weren't available then. The 1958 version of the film also had the advantage of people who'd survived the actual sinking like Sylvia Lightoller who was the widow of Second Officer Charles Lightoller played by Kenneth More. Then there's the ship itself which consisted of a derelict ocean liner, stock footage of the actual Titanic berthed at Southhampton prior to launch, and stock clips from a Nazi propaganda film also called Titanic showing the ship at sea--all of these elements are improvised together seamlessly. The only visual difference between the actual ship and Cameron's is the cinematography with Cameron's being shot in color. The interiors of both ships are virtually identical and equally extravagant, even the engine and boiler rooms are identical with the only difference here being the giant pistons in Cameron's film. It's as if Cameron took this older version, colorized it, wrote in the Jack and Rose storyline and released it--they are that similar. The dialogue is almost word for word as you'd expect of a historical event but you wouldn't expect the level of craftsmanship in the ships themselves to also be identical, but they are!

Among the film's differences are the perspectives of the disaster. James Cameron's film shows the disaster from Rose's perspective; this film shows the disaster from multiple perspectives including Second Officer Charles Lightoller and those of other ships that failed to acknowledge the doomed ocean liner’s distress rockets. The advantage of Cameron choosing 1 person's perspective is that we get to appreciate the disaster on a more visceral level through Roses’s feelings for Jack; the disadvantage of this singular perspective is in how it takes away from the scale of the disaster. Our focus is more on her losing Jack than the other 1,500 people who died in the ship's sinking. In Roy Ward Baker's version we have the inverse with the advantage of seeing the whole tragedy without bias towards 1 or 2 characters we are able to appreciate the full scale of the disaster; however, this increased perspective diminishes somewhat the emotional effect of the tragedy and we are only able to see the wholesale value of the lives that were lost. Even so, in other ways this version of Titanic is more intense than Cameron's because of its detachment. You get to see the passengers degenerate from civility to violence, from refined speech to squealing like rats with no musical score getting in the way!

If you haven't seen this film before, you'll be pleasantly surprised--as I am--at how well-made it is. A Night To Remember may seem like the same story but, like me, once you see it, you'll realize that it isn't. I have the Criterion version of this film and the picture is outstanding as is the sound. The only complaint I have with the film is that there are no subtitles to help with the English accents. But, overall, this is a minor issue.