A Night to Remember (1958)

Directed by Roy Ward Baker

The night was April 15, 1912. The weather was fair, and the ship was the greatest ever conceived by the human mind and built by human hands. She was on her maiden voyage, the last long leg of which was to take her from the port town of Cobh, in Ireland (pronounce it “COVE,” as that’s what it means; it’s just the Gaelic way to spell the English word), then called Queenstown. Four nights after leaving Cobh, she struck an iceberg, not head-on, but on the side where her engines were located. Those engines, by the way, were unimaginably massive — at least, I find it hard to imagine them. Think of the cylinders in your car’s engine. Now think of cylinders nine feet in diameter. How on earth do you get the pistons in them to move faster than the eye can follow? The Titanic had coal-fired engines, burning 1,220,000 pounds of coal each day — 610 tons. It was considered unsinkable, with huge sealed-off compartments down below, one from another, in theory impossible for water to breach them all. But that is what did happen, and in our Film of the Week, A Night to Remember, the builder himself, Thomas Andrews, Jr. (Michael Goodliffe, in a brilliantly understated performance), not only informs the Captain (Laurence Naismith; pay close attention to the man’s eyes) that, given what the iceberg has done below the water line, with a three-hundred foot gash in the side, it must happen, as the water from one compartment will overflow and fill the next, inevitably. “She should live,” says Andrews, writing figures on a pad of paper, “another — hour and a half.”

“There must be no panic,” says Captain Smith. Of course, when you have 2,000 people on board a ship with lifeboats that can carry only 1,200, and when it’s night and the icy waters of the North Atlantic surround you, panic will set in. But the British seamen did their duty to the end, with that sense that there is after all nothing else to be done. “Come on, lads!” says the chief to the engineers in the boiler room, after the last lifeboat has been lowered and there is no point in trying to keep the engines going, “It’s every man for himself now.” The key figure in the film is Second Officer Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More, the best we’ve ever seen him, and that is saying a lot), the point man between the Captain and the rest of the crew, and the man principally responsible for overseeing the evacuation. He and a few of his men were saved at the last moment when they cast themselves into the sea and managed to get to one of the lifeboats nearby.

The writers and the director, Roy Ward Baker, understood that the story of the Titanic was to be a tapestry of many stories, most of them told with but a brush stroke or two, but all united by the force of events and by our knowledge, which they are not so gauche as to make a point of, that what we’re really witnessing are human beings like ourselves, people of all kinds, in a terrible situation for which no one can be prepared. They are men and women and children. They are high-class English ladies and the bold and frank-speaking American, Molly Brown. They are businessmen, gamblers, young married couples, the seamen following orders, the builder with his terrible knowledge and an uneasy conscience, the Captain whose courage and calm impress us more than his failure to grasp at once how dire the situation was; the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Guggenheim, who have taken off their life jackets and who determine to go to their deaths together; the little boy at the very end who has lost his mother, and the old man who knows they are going to die, comforting him and telling him not to worry; the band playing to the end to keep up everyone’s spirits, with the baritone singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” — much courage, some cowardice, a good deal of justified anger from the Irish passengers in steerage, determination and wisdom from the captain of the Carpathia, fifty miles away, and stolidity and inexcusable negligence from the captain of the California, a mere ten or twelve miles away.

I believe that this is a flawless film. Some of the shots are worthy of Alfred Hitchcock at his best: the empty rocking-horse that slides across an empty room, as the ship’s tilt gives a lurch. The occasional groans of the ship, too, are perfect, groans against silence — and much more effective, and dreadful, than any crash of a symphony orchestra could ever be. The film has no “message,” which would trivialize the human dramas before our eyes, though it presents us with moral questions that call for judgment. C. S. Lewis once wrote that your neighbor is the most sacred being you will ever meet this side of the grave. Something of that awe before what a human being is, in the heights and the depths, characterizes this film all the way through. Justly so.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!