A Night to Remember (1958)

 A Night to Remember (1958)

When Titanic (1997) came out, I was so turned off by all the hype that surrounded it that I opted to go to the video store and rent (yes, those were the days) this classic version of the sinking of the mighty ship instead.

To this day, I've yet to watch Titanic.

What’s there to tell of the plot?

Yes, the ship sinks, [SPOILER.]

An odd choice for a story to be told when everyone already knows how it ends, but genius in retrospect. Hitchcock clearly explained the suspense-generating trick of letting the audience, but not the characters, know there is a ticking bomb set to go off, and this film is the full-length version of that.

Starting with getting the cast together including the ship’s architect, but also barely wasting time on exploring their individual stories other than by broad brush strokes, the focus is instead on a sort of semi-documentary, detail-focused, post-mortem analysis on how it all came to happen.

From the first reports of sighted ice, and between trouble with overloaded lines of communication and signals ignored or unable to be read; the irony of gambling when we know ahead of time there won’t be a day after to enjoy the winnings; disbelief from many different parties causing critical delay; refusal to comply because of perceived inconvenience; the apparently inevitable tragedy of second-class and steerage passengers locked within their respective decks, or of knowing there won’t be sufficient lifeboats, etc. the film masterfully build up a crescendo of suspense to unbearable levels.

Yeas, we still see a gamut of human reactions, from noble to self-destructive; but it was smart of the filmmakers to have focused on suspense and tense excitement.

With Kenneth More, Michael Goodliffe, Laurence Naismith, Kenneth Griffith, David McCallum and Tucker McGuire.

A classic that surely must have contributed to the slew of disaster films that followed it which today comprise a genre in itself.