Somente Deus por Testemunha

As I looked in awe at the special effects used to create the more recent telling of the story of the Titanic, my mind wandered back to being ten years old and seeing "A Night to Remember" on our black and white TV. Watching the portrayal of the tragic deaths of all those people and realizing that the tragedy was real kept me from sleeping well for several days. While it doesn't have the flash of the contemporary film, it has the heart the newer version never has. No star-crossed lovers, no angry fiances wielding pistols, just the people who trusted the big companies and the engineers to produce an "unsinkable" ship.

This film, which starts slowly, draws us into the lives of the several characters--put together with delicacy from the text of Walter Lord's wonderful book. The tragedy is in the hopelessness of a group of people who are at the mercy of an overall antagonist--arrogance--which will destroy them. It is all dramatic irony, like so many disaster films are and we are the viewers. The movie tries to even inject an element of humor and show the totality of the human spirit, not just the incredible despair. It's what we are.

I'm sure modern viewers will criticize the pacing (although once the action starts, it is remarkably done), but this movie has more emotional clout than Mr. Cameron's also incredible film. The acting is subtle and controlled and if one is looking for heroism, there was plenty to go around on board that ship.

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.

The Titanic was to be the greatest ship ever made, a veritable city on the sea moving between England and New York. Made in Belfast, the ship travels to England before its maiden voyage, which it makes loaded with over 2,100 people ranging from the richest gentlemen in first class down to those in stowage seeking a new life in America. However, a series of errors and oversights result in the Titanic striking an iceberg and ripping a gash along the side below the water level. As the "unsinkable" ship starts to fill with water the shortcomings of having only 1200 lifeboat spaces sinks in.

It has become very fashionable now to hate James Cameron's Titanic and it is the norm now, not only to prefer this film but to actively hate the 97 film in any review of other versions! I'm not a fan of the rather bloating modern film but I will refrain from making this review about that film and will focus on the one I've just seen. The first thing you notice here is how quickly the film moves and, after only a very brief introduction to the characters we are underway and hitting the ice. Shorn of romantic subplots and heart-tugging sweeping scores this is a very good approach and it simply lets the facts of the event and the real horror speak for themselves. In the remake we were supposed to get our emotional attachment to one or two characters based on their love for one another; here the film respects our humanity enough to know that we will be touched by the sheer number who died and the manner of their death. This works much better and it is genuinely eerie to see that large ship slip below the surface to a barrage of screams from unseen thousands – that the effects are not as good doesn't matter because they are good enough and the emotional impact more than covers for them.

This is not to say that the film lacks characters because you do tend to care for everyone and the film did very well in delivering little things without getting in the way of the rather documentary style form. The horror of the death is as well told as the horror of those watching it occur from the lifeboats; I liked the guilt of the designer and the guilt of the men who climbed into the lifeboats etc, these little touches work much better than inserting large fictional sections. With this sort of performance the actors do well – all realistic with none really upstaging the film with ham. Moore is a good lead and only at the end is his delivery a bit flat – but that is more the fault of a wordy conclusion. The rest of the cast do very well with realistic performances of fear even if they are being directed into generic class groups – simple but, with the delivery of the material, it works.

Overall, to me this is the best telling of the Titanic disaster that I have seen. The factual approach is consistently interesting and, without our attentions being directed to one or two people, the emotional impact is greater than I expected and I was quite chilled by the whole thing. For those irritated and put off by the sweeping sentimentality of the modern version, this film is the one for you.

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 actual one from the real disaster. In addition, the Titanic's fourth officer Boxhall was a technical adviser to the production. And the film's producer was there, as a small child, when the actual Titanic was launched in Belfast. This kind of authenticity makes this movie almost a living documentary.

Intelligent, honest and compelling, A Night to Remember is at least one of the best historical films ever made, and is well worth anybody's time. Everyone is bound to get something out of this movie; and indeed it is a powerhouse for anyone with an interest in the Titanic or just history in general. A totally underrated gem.

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 has to be judged primarily by the credibility of the acting and direction, not from the special effects, and I certainly support the view of the majority of IMDb users that these raise ANTR to the status of an exceptionally fine, if not almost unique, movie. A documentary presentation of a major marine disaster which is realistic enough to closely involve most of its viewers will never be everybody's choice of film to watch; but for those who wish to see it, this film will provide an exceptionally rich viewing experience.