A Night To Remember: A Titanic Film

And A Film To Remember…

There have been several film versions of the sinking of the Titanic. The first one, called Saved from the Titanic, was made in the year of the disaster, starring one of the survivors, Miss Dorothy Gibson. This was followed, in 1929, by Atlantic, a British/German dual-language version, which was the first British talkie. In 1943, Hitler’s propaganda supremo, Dr Goebbels, made a version that highlighted how bad British shipbuilding seemed to be in comparison to German engineering.

Eight years after the war, 20th Century Fox filmed a version called Titanic, which is little more than a love story, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb, that gets a bit lost when it has to deal with the sinking. Then, of course, there’s the Cameron epic of 1997, which is a flashier, very well made, and very watchable expanded version of the Clifton Webb/Barbara Stanwyck film. It also had the ship break in half, which it never did.

Which leaves the other British version — and in my opinion the best — A Night to Remember, made in 1958, and staring Kenneth More.

My father took me to see the film at the old Art-Deco cinema — The Picture House — in Stratford, and in the way The Dam Busters had affected me three years earlier A Night to Remember was something of a life changer for an eleven year old…