A Night to Remember (1958): A Review

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

A Night to Remember has been praised as the most accurate film of the Titanic sinking up to that point. Stripping away almost all the melodrama to focus on the final hours of the doomed ocean-liner, A Night to Remember still leaves an emotional impact and leaves one devastated at the true horror of that fateful night.

We get brief scenes of three separate family groups: a titled man and wife, a newlywed middle-class pair and a trio of Irish immigrants. We also see the pre-voyage preparations of Second Officer Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More) we go straight to the night of Sunday, April 14, 1912.

The Titanic has run against an iceberg, having accidentally ignored the warnings of another ship, the Californian, about the ice. The Californian has stopped due to the ice but there is no telegraph operator to hear Titanic's distress signal. A ship further away, the Carpathia, does hear it but at four hours away it will not get there in time as Titanic has at most two hours.

On board, Captain Smith (Laurence Naismith) and ship designer Thomas Andrews (Michael Goodliffe) know two things the passengers and crew do not: there are not enough lifeboats for everyone on board and that help will come too late if at all. Slowly the passengers are loaded onto the lifeboats, with class still coming into things.

The first class passengers almost in unison become irritated by what they see as unnecessary fuss. The middle class passengers are concerned. The steerage passengers are kept locked in until the first and second class passengers get onto the boards. Some first and second class passengers refuse to get on lifeboats for a variety of reasons from not wanting to leave their husbands to just wanting to bother.

While others keep gambling and reading, eventually the severity of the crisis becomes clear and as Titanic goes down to its watery grave the panic and chaos grows.

The Carpathia finally arrives to note that there are only 705 survivors both passengers and crew, with 1500 dead in one of the worst maritime disasters. In a postscript we learn that due to Titanic, all ships now are required to have a radio operator on duty 24/7, there must be enough lifeboats for every passenger and a maritime ice warning system was created.

A Night to Remember is powerfully effective due to it moving away from the melodrama the setting presents and focusing instead of the events themselves. There are moments of drama and/or romance to be sure. There is a brief scene of a male passenger going into a female passenger's cabin. There is the steerage romance between steerage passenger James Farrell (Patrick McAlliney) and a Polish girl. However, the latter is there to give us characters to focus on as later Farrell and the men he was travelling with help the Polish girl and her mother escape to a lifeboat.

People at this time were almost fifty years removed from the Titanic sinking, so while many survivors had already perished and those who remembered it were fewer, there were still enough people familiar with the story alive to fill in blanks. For most of A Night to Remember, few names were used. For example, Margaret "Molly" Brown (Tucker Maguire) was never mentioned by name but the brassy nouveau-riche American woman was clearly her. The Chairman (Frank Lawton) forever disbelieving and interfering with the crew was also the notorious J. Bruce Ismay.

Curiously, Ismay almost comes across as good man...almost, his act of saving himself less a cowardly effort to save himself than one of being allowed to board to see the ship he kept insisting was unsinkable take thousands to a watery grave.

Roy Baker's directing was quite calm, letting things flow smoothly and as realistically as possible. There were not big dramatic moments but several small dramatic ones. The scene where Mrs. Ida Straus declines to board a lifeboat preferring to end her days with her beloved husband Isidor is brief but quiet and moving.

A Night to Remember may look familiar to those who have seen the better-known Titanic, especially with Andrews looking shell-shocked in the first-class smoking room and offering advice on surviving to the young lovers. A Night to Remember, more interested in the fatal night and with almost a documentary-like feel (complete with a mix of archival footage and clips from the notorious Nazi film Titanic) is quiet, graceful, moving, impactful and informative on this great tragedy.

DECISION: A-

Titanic (1943): A Review (Review #1116)

TITANIC (1943)

In the myriads of films, television and stage productions revolving around the Titanic sinking, none has been as notorious as the 1943 film version. The reason for this is simple: Titanic was made as Nazi propaganda, finding new life as Soviet propaganda after the war. Heavily censored even by its Nazi makers, it is now available in its original version.

Titanic is overt in both its propaganda and dramatics, at times comically so. It's also wildly and comically historically inaccurate. However, as a piece of film history, it is a most interesting experience, with some surprisingly strong moments.

The greedy 'Sir Bruce Ismay' (E. F. Furbringer) has seen the White Star Line stock plummet, and he and his equally greedy stock-owners scheme to take advantage of the falling shares to make a quick killing once the price goes back up. As part of that scheme, Sir Bruce will push Captain Smith (Otto Wernicke) to keep Titanic steaming at full speed in order to make its landing in New York a day early. By doing that, the ship will win the Blue Ribbon...and the worth of their shares will go up.

'Sir Bruce' sails on the Titanic with his 'fiancee'/mistress Gloria (Kirsten Heiberg). Also aboard is wealthy financier John Jacob Astor (Karl Shonbock) and his alluring wife, Lady Astor (Charlotte Thiele). Also aboard is mysterious Baltic noblewoman Sigrid Olinsky (Sybille Schmitz), along with some Germans.

There's manicurist Hedy (Monika Burg), who strikes up a romance with Franz Gruber (Hermann Brix), first violinist of the Titanic orchestra. There are some Germans in steerage, among them the alluring Marcia (Jolly Bohnert), who teases and tantalizes two friends/brothers (Titanic never seems to establish what exactly these two men were to each other).

Then there's First Officer Petersen (Hans Nielsen), the only German officer aboard. It might be strange to see a German officer aboard a British civilian vessel, but he is a last-minute substitute for an ill English officer.

Why a German had to fill in for an Englishman the film really does not spend time on.

Petersen is the only person aboard who takes his job seriously. He is also the only man brave enough to stand up to the capitalist Sir Bruce in his selfish and greedy efforts to thwart good seamanship. Smith easily gives in to Ismay's efforts to make Titanic go faster, and he also deliberately ignores ice warnings, something that appalls Petersen.

Petersen, however, has an ounce of humanity with regards Madam Olinsky, with whom Titanic suggests there was a past relationship. Being German, of course he isn't going to show overt romantic or sexual desires, but there appears talk of 'Cairo'.

Anyway, Titanic sails on. The elite British dance long into the night in their finery, and even steerage gets entertained via a danse erotique from Marcia, which causes two men to break out into fighting. Then, despite Petersen's repeated warnings, the ship strikes an iceberg.

Ismay being Ismay shows he's not just a coward but still obsessed with money. He attempts to bribe Petersen into letting him get into a lifeboat, but the noble German won't budge an inch. Ismay and Astor, right up to the end, continue wheeling and dealing, oblivious to the dying going on about them.

Olinsky finds her courage and begins saving people, while two steerage passengers, John and Anne, are separated after seeing steerage descend into chaos. Petersen, seeing this noble woman put others ahead of herself, gives her his coat and puts her aboard a lifeboat.  He continues in his duties until the end, when he is rescued by Olinsky's lifeboat.

At the Court of Inquiry, Anne finds John, who is awoken from his shell-shock. To Petersen's immense anger, Sir Bruce (who had survived the disaster) is acquitted of all responsibility.  Titanic ends with this postscript: "The deaths of 1500 people remains unatoned for, an eternal condemnation of England's quest for profit".

Like I said, Titanic is anything but subtle.

It is pretty much impossible to divorce Titanic the film from its origins. As such, one who knows its history and purpose is hard-pressed to see the film as anything other than Nazi propaganda. However, I will do my best to examine it as a film alone.

Doing so, I see that Titanic is in many ways a laughable production. Some of the acting is so over-the-top it borders on spoof.  The subplot of Anne and John is illogical only in that one does not get to know them, and Lieselott Klinger's performance as Anne is so overly-dramatic it's hard not to laugh at her theatrics. The other performances were not much better. I cut some slack to Nielsen and Schmitz in that their characters were not very dimensional. I have to admit Furbringer played evil quite well.

There are other subplots, such as Marcia and the 'Cuban thief' Mendoz (Werner Scharf) that similarly just seem to be there to be there. The film does not justify their existence.

However, Mendoz and one of the men who fought for Marcia's affections are trapped in the informal jail cell as Titanic sinks, with the other man running about the ship in order to save his friend/brother. Is that a call-out from one Titanic to another that I see?

Titanic's only really good story is that between Hedy and Franz in that they seem to be genuinely nice people who fall quickly in love. If Titanic had had any interest in being about the lives lost aboard the doomed ship, a greater focus on these two would have been the route to follow.

Titanic, however, was not interest in such things. Otherwise, it would have also given Petersen and Olinsky's personal story more attention. It might have made Petersen into a more human character too, but now I digress.

Titanic, instead, was about one thing: the greed of the British versus the nobility of the German. "Money is the only value I believe in," Astor comments to his own wife, but he got off easy. It is the villain "Sir Bruce" who gets the worst of it (though one has never sympathized with Ismay); he not only bargains with Astor over money as the ship sinks but also turns to Olisky despite having his 'mistress' next to him.

Titanic was also disinterested in historical accuracy. J. Bruce Ismay was never knighted, let alone knighted before the ship sailed. Lady Astor was not some grande dame but 19-years-old who was five months pregnant when Titanic sank and she was left a widow. There was no grand ball as the ship struck the iceberg, let alone after. There was no 'military-style' band playing as the ship sank.

Those are the bits I can recall, but Titanic it should always be remembered was not about history but about an agenda.

However, there is a good element in Titanic: the growing chaos aboard. The scenes where the passengers, steerage and elite, have to fend for themselves after Captain Smith says "Every man for himself" have moments of genuine panic. One can see why Goebbels banned Titanic shortly after its completion, for the sequences of terrified passengers fighting to stay alive would evoke the realities of Allied bombings.

As a side note, was I wrong in thinking at the scene where men and women/children are separated in steerage that Germans would be quite efficient at such separating them by this point?

There is also a wonderful POV shot of Olinsky looking up at Petersen as her lifeboat starts its descent.  The director(s) Herbert Selpin (who "committed suicide" before the film was completed) and Werner Klingler (who completed the film) even managed to sneak in a touch of humor. During Marcia's danse erotique, even the old man who serves as a father-figure seems aroused.

Finally, there is a genuine moment of pathos in Titanic. One of the telegraph operators, knowing he is doomed, releases his beloved pet bird as we hear the band play Nearer, My God to Thee. It's the rare moment of humanity the film offers.

Titanic is an interesting film from a historic viewpoint on how state-sponsored cinema was used as a tool for the State. It found new life as a state-sponsored tool with its anti-capitalist message in East Germany and other Soviet bloc states. As a film, Titanic is at times overly dramatic with not much in terms of character development, shirking some potential stories in order to pass its message. However, the scenes of panic among the passengers holds up pretty well.

Tainted by its association with evil, Titanic is at least not overtly propaganistic. It's not a film I would recommend for entertainment, let alone accuracy, but as one for showing the power of cinema to sway an audience.

DECISION: C-

Titanic (1953): A Review

TITANIC (1953)

While the multi-Academy Award winning film of the same name is perhaps the best-known version, the story of the Titanic sinking has been told many times over. The 1953 version of Titanic is more reflective of the times in it which was made than of the time it is set.  It is also wildly historically inaccurate and a bit rushed.  However, with some strong performances and moving moments, Titanic holds up rather well.

American expatriate Julia Sturges (Barbara Stanwyck) is taking her children Annette (Audrey Dalton) and Norman (Harper Carter) to Michigan, ostensibly to visit her parents. In reality, she's fleeing from her social-climbing husband Richard (Clifton Webb), who has been schlepping the family across Europe to make a name for them.

Richard races to board Titanic, forced to buy a third-class ticket from a Basque family to get aboard. Julia is shocked to find her husband on the ship, and a struggle between them commences for the hearts and minds of Annette and Norman. Annette, who has become rather snobbish, is angered that Julia plans to have them leave the marble halls of Paris and agrees to go back to Europe when they dock in New York. 

Norman is oblivious to all this, though he idolizes Richard.  Julia concedes that Annette is old enough to make her own choices, but won't give Norman up.  She then gives Richard a surprise: revealing Norman isn't his son.

While Annette is too elitist for even such figures as John Jacob Astor and his wife, or "Montana mining millionairess Maude Young" (Thelma Ritter), she soon starts warming to the attentions of Purdue University tennis player Giff Rogers (Robert Wagner). Soon, she begins to fancy him and starts tentatively integrating with people her own age.

Norman is puzzled as to why his father won't deal with him, too involved with a long-running bridge game to care to spend time with him.  Julia begs him to not shut Norman out, but Richard won't budge. As things culminate, the Titanic hits that fatal iceberg, and the Sturges family makes fateful choices.

Titanic feels like an abbreviated miniseries, no doubt due to its brief running time of around an hour and a half. As such, plot elements introduced in Titanic don't seem to have much power or development.

For example, there's a subplot about George Healey (Richard Baseheart), a defrocked alcoholic priest who is returning to his family in disgrace. He pops up every so often and is given a noble end, but for a film this short it almost feels like filler.

The film has more than its share of flaws. Some flaws are minor. For example, Thelma Ritter's Maude Young is obviously a stand-in for "The Unsinkable Molly Brown", though from what I understand there were legal complications that prevented the name "Molly Brown" from being used. That in itself isn't a big issue. The big issue is giving Ritter so little to do apart from being Richard's bridge partner. Molly Brown/not Molly Brown seems almost tailor-made for Ritter, so it's a shame she just popped in and out.

Other flaws are a bit more noticeable. Even without being well-versed in Titanic history, a lot of Titanic does not feel historically accurate. For example, Captain Smith (Brian Aherne) seems to be in a great hurry to get passengers off the ship, which does not seem accurate.  Even that could be overlooked if the performance matched that sense of urgency.

Be that as it may, Titanic also has more pluses. Webb was strong as this rather unpleasant character whom you were rooting against. Right from the get-go when he cajoles the Basque immigrants Webb manages to say offensive things without being thoroughly reprehensible. "Go into one of your tribal huddles and discuss", he snaps when the husband and wife star weighing his offer.

This, however, was what was needed to make his evolution into a man willing to sacrifice himself more moving. While Jean Negulesco was not a strong enough director to make the impact the scene could have had, one is touched when Richard, snob that he is, rushes down to steerage to rescue the Basque family who sold him the ticket, making sure they got on a lifeboat.

His last scene with Norman, who opted to give up his own lifeboat scene to a woman to be with his father, is also incredibly moving. Even now, films that even suggest children dying is rare, but Titanic took that on, making the suggesting of it more emotional.

Stanwyck too showed her incredible range, projecting both an elegance and devastating heartbreak when she finds that Norman isn't on the lifeboat as she thought. In turns understand, angry and regretful, Stanwyck really could do it all.

I wasn't sold on Dalton as Annette, someone who came close to making Veda from Mildred Pierce look like Mother Teresa, but she did well as the snob who started to change and see the positives of college students from Indiana. Wagner had an affable charm to Giff, one who could quickly be smitten by this very pretty girl out of his league. 

Not as massive as other Titanic films, this version is an acceptable fictionalization of that tragic event. With generally strong performances and a moving, albeit wildly inaccurate elements, Titanic works well enough.

DECISION: B-

Titanic (1997): A Review (Review #1103)

TITANIC (1997)

When The Love Boat Met The Poseidon Adventure...

I was not fond of Titanic when it premiered.  I thought it was long, slow, boring and devoid of anything good apart from the actual sinking.  Now, twenty-one years later, I revisit Titanic to see if time has either softened or hardened my views.

To my surprise, I have softened when it comes to Titanic. Unlike the last two times I saw it (when it was first released and maybe ten years later), I didn't shout, "JUST DIE ALREADY!" as our leads are floating in the water. I also was more moved by certain things in it. However, I also noticed more flaws within it that I hadn't seen before.

Arrogant underwater explorer/treasure hunter/scavenger Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) is searching the wreckage of the RMS Titanic for a legendary blue diamond thought lost in the sinking: The Heart of the Ocean. So far the search has come up empty, but he hits a surprising clue when he discovers the safe of its last recorded owner. He finds a drawing of a nude woman wearing The Heart of the Ocean, and the drawing is dated April 15, 1912, the date the ship sank.

A news report on the drawing's discovery attracts the attention of one Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stewart), who contacts Lovett and asks, "I was just wondering if you had found 'The Heart of the Ocean' yet, Mr. Lovett". Lovett, astonished that this 100-year-old woman knows about the diamond, asks how she knows about it.  Simple, she replies: the woman in the drawing is her.

Over the doubts and objections of Lovett's second-in-command Lewis (Lewis Abernathy), Mrs. Calvert, accompanied by her granddaughter Lizzy (Suzy Amis), comes aboard their ship to give more information. After a lengthy explanation about how Titanic sank, we get to Rose's memories around 20 minutes into Titanic.

Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) is among the first-class passengers making the maiden voyage on Titanic. She's accompanied by her Mother Ruth (Frances Fisher) and her fiancee Calcion 'Cal' Hockley (Billy Zane). Rose does not love Cal, who in turn does not appreciate her elegant manner or taste in art, remarking that the paintings she bought by 'something Picasso' won't amount to much.

Last-minute passengers onto Titanic are Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Italian buddy Fabrizio (Danny Nucci), having won tickets in a poker game and rushing to get aboard. These third-class or steerage passengers are just happy to be aboard. However, just one look by Jack onto Rose is enough to have him fall smashingly in love with this beauty, though his fellow steerage passenger, Irishman Tommy (Jason Berry) tells him she's way out of his league.

Jack is laying about the deck when Rose rushes to the stern to attempt suicide. Jack talks her out of it but are discovered by Cal and his valet, Lovejoy (David Warner). She lies and says she slipped while trying to get a look at the propellers and that Jack managed to rescue her from falling overboard. As thanks, Cal agrees to have Jack dine with them in first class.

Jack and Rose start spending time together, where she marvels at his artistic talent and independence. With a little help from nouveau riche Margaret "Molly" Brown (Kathy Bates), whom Ruth and Cal look down on but can't ignore since she is a very wealthy woman, Jack manages to show himself well dining in first class. Rose, despondent over how boring her life will be, manages to slip into steerage, where everyone is dancing to wild Irish jigs, even managing to show off her own dancing skills.

The attraction between Jack and Rose grows, but class still gets in the way. Ruth reminds Rose that she needs to marry Cal as they are essentially destitute. Rose, Ruth and Cal among others also get an informal tour of Titanic by its designer, Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber). Ruth realizes that there are not enough lifeboats for every passenger on Titanic, but as the ship is billed as 'unsinkable', this is not of much concern to anyone save Rose.

Jack urges Rose to come away with him when they dock in New York, and Rose struggles with this. That fateful night, she and Jack go to her stateroom, where she asks Jack to paint her like his French girls, wearing the Heart of the Ocean...and only the Heart of the Ocean.

After he does his illustration, they run around the ship, culminating in a tryst in the back seat of a car. After they consummate their love and go back on deck do we get to the ship striking the iceberg.

Amid the chaos of the slow-sinking ship, Cal manages to frame Jack for theft of the Heart of the Ocean. Jack is placed in the master-at-arms office and essentially left to die. Rose, realizing that half of the passengers are doomed, is determined to find Jack, even if it means not getting on a lifeboat with her mother and Molly Brown.

The rest of Titanic is of Jack and Rose attempting to survive A Night to Remember, with the growing chaos and horror of the sinking interfering in their lives along with that of Cal, still determined to kill them.

At last, after hearing her story and being moved to tears, the true horror and tragedy of the Titanic sinking hits Brock.  Old Rose then goes to the stern of the exploration ship and there, drops The Heart of the Ocean above where Titanic rests, she having had the diamond all these decades. As she either drifts off to sleep or dies, we see her as that young girl, where she is greeted by Jack, reunited to the cheers of the others who died on that awful night.

As I said, time has softened somewhat my views on a film I thoroughly hated on first sight. I did find myself more emotional once the ship started sinking, which takes up the last hour of this three-hour-plus film.

I have to give writer/director James Cameron credit for the good he did.  The sinking of Titanic is in turns terrifying and tragic, especially when we hear the ship's quartet play Nearer, My God to Thee as we see the doomed passengers and crew die, attempt to save themselves or calmly accept their impending deaths. The juxtaposition is heartbreaking, effective and powerfully moving.

It is impossible not to react emotionally at this part of Titanic, and I did get a little misty-eyed.

On the technical side of things Titanic excels. Cameron not only put much effort into attention to detail in terms of production design but also in visual effects.  The sinking is a spectacular sequence that would have made Cecil B. DeMille proud. Although time has made the animation more obvious, particularly when we get wide shots of the 'people' roaming the ship (and can tell they are not real), on the whole the visual effects are still first-rate.

Pity that Cameron's script is lousy.

One thing I noticed here that I had not noticed before is the total lack of complexity in his characters. There is no shading with any character. They are either all good (Jack, Rose, Molly, Andrews) or all evil (Cal, Lovejoy, Ruth, or White Star Line executive J. Bruce Ismay, played by Jonathan Hyde). There is nothing in the characters that gives them variety.

Cameron also wants us to feel for characters we meet but never get to know.  We see Tommy and Fabrizio exactly three times, so despite the film's best efforts we don't know them long enough to invest any interest or emotion when they die.

As a side note, each time I've seen Titanic, I either laugh or cheer when one of the smoke stacks falls on Fabrizio, as I found him to be the most annoying and useless character, with nothing to do or add to the proceedings. 

It's a competition to see who can give the worst performance in Titanic, and there are several candidates. Lewis Abernathy's Lewis comes to mind. I guess intended as 'comic relief', he is horrendously self-consciously annoying. One wonders if when he calls Rose Calvert a fraud, "like that Russian babe, Anesthesia", he was serious or making a joke. Either way, it was awful.

Danny Nucci has a good chance of being the worst too, his Fabrizio saddle with an Italian accent The Simpsons would find too much of a parody and with only one expression: an almost perpetually idiotic grin.  Farmer and Paxton were all one-note, reflective of their characters.

However, the worst performance has to be Zane's Cal.

He was genuinely in need of a mustache to twirl as he was irredeemably EVIL. Even in the few times it appeared the script wanted him to be remotely human, he failed. His performance consisted of nothing but looking haughty, and worse, he never expressed any desire for Rose. One wonders why he was so determined to marry someone he genuinely didn't like.

Despite how praised she was, I found Winslet rather mannered and theatrical as Rose. Granted, she was saddled with some awful dialogue ("I'd rather be HIS whore than YOUR wife!", and "I want you to paint my like your French girls, Jack, wearing this.  Wearing ONLY this") but she didn't seem all the trouble. DiCaprio became a teen idol with Titanic, but I never found Jack endearing or worth all the trouble either.

The only real performances were Bates as the unsinkable brassy broad Molly Brown and Gloria Stuart as the older Rose.

Note they also cheated: Rose specifically asks if they had found The Heart of the Ocean, which is impossible since she had it all the time.

Finally, as to the 'love theme', I will always hate My Heart Will Go On, as I find it bombastic and nonsensical. "Love was when I loved you". Really, people think those lyrics are logical?

I kept thinking how well the film would have been if Cameron had made changes.  They could have all been first or third-class passengers. Rose could have been remembering at a Titanic exhibition. We could have dropped the entire present-day scenes, even if they were there merely as exposition to tell us how Titanic sank.

Titanic is too big to ignore, and many people love the film.  It's not my place or desire to take their love for it away. For my part, I found it all a bit tawdry and melodramatic. There are some films I love revisiting, that still thrill me and move me: Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai, All Quiet on the Western Front, It's A Wonderful Life, Some Like It Hot.

I am just so thankful that after today, I will never have to revisit Titanic again.

DECISION: C-

1998 Best Picture Winner: Shakespeare In Love