A Night to Remember (1958) - film review

On 10th April 1912, RMS Titanic leaves the port of Southampton, England on her maiden voyage.  At 883 feet in length, she is the largest ship ever to have been built, and is reputed to be unsinkable.  The first class accommodation is palatial, whilst those who travel steerage class have to content themselves with bunks in cramped cabins.  On 14th April, the ship’s radio operator receives ice warnings from other vessels in the area but these are unheeded by Captain Edward J. Smith and his second officer, Charles Lightoller.  That night, the ship strikes an iceberg and incurs a three hundred foot long gash below the waterline.  The ship’s builder, Thomas Andrews, is certain that Titanic will sink within about two hours.  He is proven correct: the lower compartments have already started to flood and nothing can be done to keep the ship afloat.  The crew begins sending distress signals but the nearest ship to respond, Carpathia, is at least four hours away and will not arrive before Titanic is completely submerged.  The captain gives the order for the ship to be evacuated.  Knowing that there is space in the lifeboats for only 1178 passengers, the captain realises that around half of the 2223 passengers and crew will perish, so he gives the command that women and children be put into the lifeboats first.  This would be a night to remember – for the 706 people who would survive...

The story of the Titanic disaster has been told many times in the cinema, but never with the authority, realism and poignancy of A Night to Remember, a superlative adaptation of Walter Lord’s best selling book of the same title.  Producer William MacQuitty was determined to make the film as accurate as possible, so every incident in the film has a factual basis and all of the sets and models were designed using the blueprints for the original ship.  The result is a gripping and informative drama-documentary that culminates in what is possibly the most harrowing twenty minutes of any film.  Although it was not a great commercial success in America (owing presumably to the absence of big name actors), the film was highly rated by the critics and it won the Golden Globe award in 1959 in the best English-Language Foreign Film category.  Many consider this to be the finest film ever to be made by the Rank Organisation.

A Night to Remember is undoubtedly the career highpoint for Roy Baker, who directs the film with great economy and restraint.  He had made several highly regarded film dramas before this but would become better known for his offerings in the fantasy horror genre in the following decade, including Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and Scars of Dracula (1970).  Baker began his career making documentaries and so was an appropriate choice to direct this film, which is made in the semi-documentary style that was in vogue in British cinema at the time.

Effective cross-cutting between convincing sets and model shots convey the full impact of the nautical tragedy which the world would never forget.  Whilst the film feels epic, we never lose sight of the impact that the disaster has on those individuals who are caught up in it.  Men separated from their wives and children.  Lovers united in death.  The panic and stoicism of those who know that they are about to die.  The unreality of the sinking of a craft that was universally believed to be unsinkable is strangely heightened by the realistic manner in with which the story of told.   The film also serves as  a powerful indictment of the class system which prevailed in England prior to the Titanic disaster, a system that would be swept aside by the war that ravaged Europe a few years later.

There is something quintessentially British about the way in which the disaster is portrayed.  There is no need for the scriptwriter to embellish the story with plot contrivance and drawn-out character development.  The pathos and drama are already there, in the situation, in the naturalistic depiction of how human beings respond to a life and death crisis.  All this is a far cry from the overblown Hollywood treatment audiences would later get from James Cameron in his 1997 blockbuster Titanic which, whilst a spectacular piece of cinema, lacks the authentic touch which makes A Night to Remember so moving and memorable.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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