Film Info 1958 123 minutes Black and
White
1.66:1 Dolby Digital Mono 1.0
Region 2 Not Anamorphic
English.
A Night to Remember is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1. This new digital transfer was created from a 35mm composite fine-grain master. Partial digital video restoration: Kevin Manbeck, Mathematical Technologies, Inc., Providence, R.I. optimal image quality: dual-layer edition Pristine digital transfer with restored image and sound in the film’s original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. Unfortunately this Carlton edition does not have the screen-specific audio commentary by Don Lynch, author, and Ken Marschall, illustrator, of Titanic—An Illustrated History The Making of “A Night to Remember” (1993), as is on the Criterion Collection edition but does include a 60-minute documentary featuring William MacQuitty’s rare behind-the-scenes Footage
Herbert Lightoller…Kenneth More
Mrs. Lucas…Honor Blackman
Thomas Andrews…Michael Goodliffe
Phillips…Kenneth Griffith
Bride…David McCallum
Molly Brown…Tucker McGuire
Mr. Lucas…John Merivale
Mr. Ismay…Frank Lawton
Captain Smith…Laurence Naismith
Joughin (the baker)…George Rose
Produced by…William MacQuitty
Directed by…Roy Ward Baker
Screenplay by…Eric Ambler
Based on the book…by Walter Lord
Director of photography…Geoffrey Unsworth, B.S.C.
Editor…Sidney Hayers
Music composed by…William Alwyn
Art director…Alex Vetchinsky
Costume designer…Yvonne Caffin
In Ray Johnson’s documentary The Making of “A Night to
Remember”, Walter Lord says that when he wrote his 1955 book on the 1912
sinking of the Titanic, there was no mass interest in the topic; nothing had
been written about it in the previous four decades. The statement demonstrates
Lord’s focus: the event’s reality rather than its mythology. For in 1953,
Twentieth Century-Fox presented a smash hit melodrama called Titanic, produced
and co-written by Billy Wilder’s long-time partner, Charles Brackett, who,
astonishingly, won an Oscar for the soap-operatic script. A forerunner of ’70s
disaster films, Titanic hooked the audience with fictional star turns for
Clifton Webb, Barbara Stanwyck, and Richard Basehart; the catastrophe served to
test their bogus characters.
Although in his acknowledgments Lord thanked a Fox employee for being “a gold
mine of useful leads,” Lord’s meticulous page-turner reverses Hollywood’s
priorities. Drawing on historical
materials and survivors’ first-hand accounts, it provides a minute-by-minute
record of what actually happened—the mundane ness and absurdity as well as the
heartbreak. In this high point of you-are-there realism, kaleidoscopic anecdotes
flesh out and clarify the ship’s downfall and the hierarchical treatment of
its first-, second-, and third class passengers.
The impulse to get things right also motivates the superb 1958 British movie
adaptation, produced by William MacQuitty, directed by Roy Baker, and written by
Eric Ambler. As a boy of six, MacQuitty watched the Titanic’s launch from a
Belfast shipyard. But the experience all three men shared—morale-boosting
documentary and feature production in World War II—accounts for this film’s
stirring vividness. In its directness of attack and its use of composite
characters, A Night to Remember brought the best of Britain’s fact-based war
culture into the late ’50s. The moviemakers give their period piece the
immediacy of a docudrama and in so doing pierce through popular misconceptions.
The Titanic is fixed in the common vocabulary as a symbol of slipshod design:
Politicians accuse complacent foes of “dancing on the Titanic,” cut-rate
travel services contend, “We’re not the Queen Mary, but we’re not the
Titanic, either.” By positioning the steamer as the film’s true star,
MacQuitty and company remind us that it was—if not “unsinkable”—a
paragon of power and luxury. Human error and natural calamity led to its fatal
scrape with an iceberg. A Night to Remember has a plainspoken complexity. It
emphasizes that laxness, snobbery, and hubris coexisted with discipline and
courage on a night when 705 were saved and roughly 1500 lost. The film allows
you to be infuriated by any number of screw-ups and oversights, including the
neglect of steerage passengers, yet still be awestruck by the crisp judgment of
the ship’s captain (Laurence Naismith), second officer (Kenneth More), and
builder (Michael Goodliffe). In the midst of mayhem, Mrs. Isidor Straus spurns a
seat in a lifeboat so she can spend the remainder of her life with her husband,
and a gentleman tells his wife and three children to go on and not worry,
because he’ll follow soon (he knows he won’t; there aren’t enough boats).
This film, like Lord’s history, captures the final gasp of high-society
chivalry.
Lord writes in his book: “What troubled people especially was not just the
tragedy—or even its needlessness—but the element of fate in it all. If the
Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions
had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had
seen the berg fifteen seconds sooner—or fifteen seconds later . . . if she had
hit the ice any other way. . . if
her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried
enough boats . . . if the Californian [just 10 miles away] had only come. Had
any one of these ‘ifs’ turned out right, every life might have been saved.
But they all went against her—a classic Greek tragedy.”
Eric Ambler, the screenwriter, is famous for pioneering the thriller form in
modern classics like his novel A Coffin for Dimitrios, not for updating Greek
tragedy. Yet in Dimitrios’ opening lines, Ambler admits that chance can
“operate with a sort of fumbling coherence readily mistakable for the workings
of a self-conscious Providence.” In his scripts for military movies like The
Cruel Sea, he depicts the waste and the human salvage of men in desperate
straits. A Night to Remember is an Ambler thriller turned inside out. Although
you know the ship will sink, Ambler marshals his information so skilfully that
he catches you up in the strands of a fatal parabola. And although you keep
waiting for the doomed to enter a “state of abandon” (a state Ambler charts
in his books, in the phrase of his great fan Graham Greene), most of the
Titanic’s victims face death with dignity and courage.
Director Baker, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, and art director Alex
Vetchinsky achieve maximum tension and clarity; Bill Wallington’s ingenious
special effects never overwhelm the drama. The moviemakers increasingly employ
Carol Reed-like tilted shots. But in Reed’s films, the director tilts the
camera, to express moral and psychological uncertainty. Baker keeps the camera
level:
The sets tilt as the ship goes under. When a rocking-horse sways menacingly in
close-up, the floor seems to drop from under your feet; the world loses its
bearings. As the documentary notes, the hydraulic jacks that shifted the sets
emitted a groan identical to the sound of the teetering ship—the eeriest
example of the way craft imitated life and created art. You believe the stalwart
second officer when he says he’ll never be sure again—of anything.
Michael Sragow reviews new movies for The SF Weekly and old ones for The New Yorker.
review done 2001