Review of A Night to Remember (1958) by Phil C — 07 Feb 2011

"A Night To Remember" was the first version of the Titanic story I ever saw, long before James Cameron got his hands on it. It's remarkable now for reasons other than the ones it's original audience would have enjoyed: The first is God's perceived involvement, where He is thought to have been insulted by the ship being billed as "unsinkable",so He plots his revenge. This is probably something that would be ignored today as too fundamentalist and an example of blindly vengeful thinking by a supposedly benign deity!

The second is the way the Titanic goes to the bottom in one piece, allegedly because the thought that british engineering, seen as the best in the world, could have failed so disastrously couldn't be countenanced:

The last is the british class system, seen here at it's Edwardian zenith and mirrored perfectly by Titanic's passenger accomodation arrangements,which was ultimately responsible for the unneccessary deaths of hundreds of "steerage" passengers, locked below to drown like rats when the truth of the ship's fate was realised - seen now, it's an early (and probably justified) example of survivor guilt, what better way to defend yourself from accusations of self preservationism and dereliction of duty than to paint yourself as a hero - most of the people who could have contradicted you were at the bottom of the Atlantic!

Despite it's flaws, I still like "A Night To Remember" better than "Titanic", there's a quiet dignity in the ship's band playing "Nearer My God To Thee", - even if they didn't actually play it, their last stand being an episcopal hymn called "Autumn" - the survivors on one of the lifeboats reciting The Lord's Prayer as the ship slips beneath the waves to a background of terrified screaming, and the way Kenneth More plays Lightoller (who went on to help with the Dunkirk evacuation in real life) with stoic stiff-upperlippedness, keeping his head while all around him are losing theirs. They don't make 'em like this anymore!