A fine conclusion [to my festival]

A Night to Remember (1958)

Starring: Kenneth More, Michael Goodliffe, Kenneth Griffith, Anthony Bushell, and James Dyrenforth

Writer: Eric Ambler

Director: Roy Ward Baker

Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Based on the eponymous book by American writer Walter Lord.  Whereas the other films I've watched this week all deal with an additional story, be it a love affair, a famous passenger, or just the Titanic itself, A Night to Remember cuts to the chase.  It takes James Cameron's version until the end of the first cassette to get where Night is when it's less than a third over.  Despite this, it is not an exploitative action movie.  In fact, it's probable that Cameron copied heavily from this film.  The special effects, by the way, are in any way as good as the ones in that movie, one of whose 11 Oscars was for this field.  It was one of the first films to use slow motion for dramatic effect.

I did not know that SOS was a new concept in 1912, or that it stood for "save our souls."  I just heard of Rihanna's song, her first big hit.  Now I know it's mainly used by ships at sea.

Activity onboard the Carpathia, the ship that rescued the survivors, is something exclusive to this subject.  Roy Ward Baker was mainly known for directing horror films, and it shows in this one, what with the direction of the ordeal, combined with the fact that this actually happened.  This film does have some some flaws, though, mainly that despite many Americans having boarded the Titanic, this film has an all-British cast.  Also, there is one anachronism at the end, where someone smokes casually and someone takes a modern leftist attitude toward it.

Interestingly, it is in this version that the hallways are the tallest, and people throw themselves off the end of the vessel, as they did when the Great Depression began.  This film was originally titled Titanic, which means that if it had stayed that way, more than half of our subjects would have had that exact name. (The others, if you'll recall, were from 1996, 1997, and 1953.) I watched a brand-spanking-new (released March 27) DVD from the Criterion Collection; they are known for archiving the world's great films and releasing them on DVD and Blu-ray.  Their website should be of interest to any serious film buff.

A Night to Remember is a fine conclusion to an occasion for which I should have played the song "Taps" from YouTube.