A Night to Remember (1958)

[jean9]

Hallo, Jean, and thanks for your comments. Regards to the other 8 Jeans, by the way!

You did a good service to the kids by showing Cameron's film and then recommending that ANTR was worth a viewing. Next time, might I suggest that you reverse the order in the billing?

I agree wholeheartedly with your preferred order of billing, however, can you imagine showing (God forbid) a black and white film, starring a group of actors they didn't recognised to a group of 14 year olds!!

On the ANTR theme, some years ago I wrote to Kenneth More asking him about his experiences whilst filming ANTR. He sent me a great signed photo and comments on the reverse as follows:

'We filmed Glasgow docks and Lake at Ruislip. It was hell jumping in!!'

I also discovered that he has a connection with Jersey (where I live) in that he went to boarding school here and used to live in the same street as me!!

 

[Bob Godfrey]

Well, Jean, this is the way I used to do it:

Me: Would you like to see an old black & whilte film about a ship sinking?
Class: *&!!@?<&* off!
Me: So you'd prefer one of my usual lessons?
Class: OK, bring on the film.

If it was hell for Kenneth More, my sympathies are with the others - he was the only one in a wetsuit!

 

[Sandy McLendon]

Jean: I think you are greatly to be admired for getting such young people to watch a black-and-white film at all! Many simply will not do it. We are now far enough removed in time from the black-and-white era that there are two generations of prospective moviegoers who consider such films unwatchable. Sadly, this scorn for such films means that studios offer many fewer black-and-white titles on home video than they could; the market for what they call "classic catalogue" is seriously limited by the factor. I am glad you persevered!

I would like to point out something about the re-release of the Cameron film. While he did transfer it to the 3-D process, he declined to re-do the special effects, in the manner of George Lucas (the Star Wars films) and Steven Spielberg (E.T. and others). He has also declined to go back and correct errors; the film will stand as an artifact of the time of its making, warts and all. I vastly prefer this to the revisionism practiced by the likes of Lucas and Spielberg.

Interestingly, the re-release of the Cameron movie has thus far grossed another $200 million worldwide. That is equal to its negative cost*, which is rare performance for a fifteen-year-old film that has been in continuous release on home video.

* The "negative cost" of a movie is the amount of money spent on putting it on film and turning that film into a releasable movie. Everything from scriptwriting charges to costume and set costs, to actor and crew salaries, to special effects, editing, dubbing and titling are included.

 

[Jake Peterson]

Well, it doesn't help matters that the only place on TV you can see movies from 1900-1960 is on the Turner Classic Movie Channel on cable in the U.S. They used to show older movies on regular channels all the time.

 

[Bob Godfrey]

Bill MacQuitty recalled: "I told James (Cameron) that we shared one problem in common. 'What was that?' he asked. 'Getting the money', I replied. 'I had to raise half a million pounds and you had to raise $230 million'. We both laughed." In 2001 ANTR's Director, Roy Baker, remarked: "I'm still told by Bill that our film has yet to go into profit". But I imagine that when MacQuitty said that he was still laughing!

(The production cost of ANTR in today's money would be around £10m or $16m)

 

[Sandy McLendon]

Bob: That allows for inflation, but sadly, the cost of the various crafts services needed on a movie has risen much more dramatically than costs in general. In 1939, Gone With the Wind cost roughly $4.25 million. Simple inflation would make that around $66 million today, but there is no way you could duplicate what is on the screen for that amount of money. A remake of GWTW made to the same standard as the original would probably cost an amount closer to what Cameron's Titanic did.

Studios used to have all their crafts services people under contract, at so much per week. Now, they have to outshop nearly everything, and it's fiendishly expensive. That's much of what made Titanic '97 so expensive; all that millwork and carving for paneling, all the custom-made chairs for the First Class dining salon, reproductions of the Marconi equipment, all of it done at whatever specialist firms were equipped to do it - it all added up. And up. And up.

 

[Bob Godfrey]

Yes, I know, Sandy. I've made that same point myself in other threads when people inquire what it would cost to enjoy the labour-intensive delights of 1st Class travel if the Titanic was still in service today. Or indeed to build a replica Titanic. Since 1912, prices in Britain have gone up by around 60 times. But labour costs have risen by a factor of around 300. Of course, the level of labour as opposed to machine input has in many areas been much reduced, which complicates matters except in areas where craft skills - or the constant attentions of all those stewards - are indispensable.

It would be very difficult to calculate precisely what the cost of ANTR would be if remade today to the same standards, and that's not what I was intending to show. Keeping in mind that MacQuitty was able to source a great deal of his props and sets from scrapyards rather than costly replication, and with due allowance for the average level of wage inflation in the UK allied to general price inflation my best guess would be that the 'parts and labour' costs involved back in 1958 would translate in terms of the spending power of a modern pound to no more than £20-25m.

 

[Emilie]

well, I no doubt it's my FAVE TITANIC MOVIE of all time! Actors are all brillant, special mention to the great Michael Goodliffe as the brave, indeed desperate Thomas Andrews. The smoking room scenes gave me chills evry time I saw them! Kenneth More is all genuine, meanhwhile Lightoller isn't my fave character of the story. The sets are wonderfully mades especially from considering the financial amount for a blockbuster in the late 1950's.

 

[Bob Godfrey]

Aside from Kenneth More, the actor who got most screen time in ANTR was John Cairney as Irish 3rd Class passenger Patrick Murphy. Cairney sees his role as equivalent in some ways to that of Jack Dawson in Cameron's film: "Leonardo DiCaprio played the same part I did, which was obviously fattened out for him. But it was the lower-class guy falling in love with the girl ... while the steerage class were locked in, my character found a way out, and so did DiCaprio’s ... The difference was, he was paid thousands of pounds a second and I was paid £20 a day." That says a lot about the economics of film-making back in 1958, when very few actors had celebrity status and their payment was a minor element in the budget! Possibly the best paid were the stuntmen, who charged £1 per foot for jumping from a height into the water. So in a few seconds they could earn as much as Cairney did in a week. But the cheapest performance came from the Asturias, a vintage liner with a full set of real Welin davits, which played the part of the Titanic in all the boat-launching scenes. James Cameron paid millions to replicate The Titanic's boat deck; the breakers' yard which had acquired the Asturias rented it to the Rank Organisation for ten nights at just £10 per night.

 

[Robert T. Paige]

Bob:

It's my belief that Cameron might have escaped the amount of criticism he got had he done just one thing: He needed to make the "doomed romance" element of his script more plausible by confining it to two members of the First Class. There was absolutely no reason this could not have been done (God knows enough young men in First Class perished), and it would have made all the difference with Titanophiles. Other errors, such as the Hollywood-obligatory locking of the Bostwick gates, would have been criticized, but not to the extent they have been, I think.

I find your comments on ANTR's technical aspects interesting, because you're quite right - it was an era when American movie-goers were primed to expect, in Cole Porter's words, "Glorious Technicolor, breathtaking CinemaScope and stereophonic sound." Since I don't know a great deal about ANTR's production history, I am left wondering why it was not filmed in color, to improve its chances in the North American market. Certainly, the British film industry was well-acquainted with color film-making; Powell and Pressburger's "The Red Shoes" (1948) contains some of the finest Technicolor design and filming ever seen on the screen, far more advanced than American work in the process; the movie is full of things that simply were not technically possible when it was made - and yet, there they are.

Cameron's film and ANTR share one failing: Margaret Brown is depicted as a plain woman. She was actually rather attractive, and she must have had somewhat more social finesse than she's credited with in films about her; J.J. Astor seems to have found her agreeable company.

Margaret Brown seems to come off as sort of a hick in both ANTR and "Titanic" (1997) . Actually I understand she was quite fluent in several languages and was a big help with some of the surviving immigrants.

I probably shouldn't even mention it, but I have heard it said that "Titanic" (1953) was -Quote - "The worstTitanic movie ever made." - Unquote. A list of errors would take up much too much space on this forum, so I won't even attempt that.

IMHO Brian Aherne is a rather poor physical portrayal of Captain Smith ; there is no J. Bruce Ismay ; there is no Thomas Andrews and there is a "thinly veiled" character of "Maude Young" instead of Margaret Brown. In my opinion the only redeeming part is the snappy dialogue between Webb and Stanwyck. Even "Gifford Rogers" and "Annette Sturges" were a little closer in social standing than "Jack and Rose.".....And "Gifford Rogers" did survive.

This was the first of the three "Titanic" movies that I have seen on the big screen and later on DVD's.

 

[Sandy McLendon]

Robert:

For my money, the 1953 version exposes the great weakness of Hollywood moviemaking during the studio era - hubris. There was a great over-confidence in the factory system of moviemaking that had evolved over the course of decades. "Hey, we got standing sets of ship decks. We got the backlot. We got warehouses fulla props. We got racks uh costumes. There's all these people sittin' around on contract. Let's make a movie about thuh Titanic!"

Movies never get things exactly right - the Cameron film didn't after spending many times what the real Titanic cost. But the '53 film is a special case of "don't-give-a-damn-itis," with everyone evidently figuring that no facts or authenticity could hold a candle to the sight of Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb orating their way through a mediocre script.

 

[Adam Went]

The 1953 "Titanic" strikes me as a typical Hollywood advertisement of star power from the era as opposed to having any real authenticity. It's almost like the producers said "Let's get two of the biggest movie stars going around to portray a troubled couple in a typical love story, oh and by the way we'll have it on board the Titanic."

But for all that I don't believe it's the worst Titanic film ever made - that honour goes to the 1996 mini-series featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones, with 1979's "S.O.S. Titanic" running a very close second.

Unlike some, I actually really enjoyed 1980's "Raise the Titanic" - at least it was something a bit different.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

[Sandy McLendon]

As cheesy as Raise the Titanic! looks to young people today, we have to remember two things:

1) It was a couple of decades before really good digital effects were available, and -
2) In the mid-1970s, there was no certain knowledge that Titanic broke up; survivor accounts varied. It was still plausible that the old girl was resting gently on the bottom.

 

[Adam Went]

Hi Sandy,

"Raise the Titanic!" is completely unrealistic, from the storyline (what was it,a vault of byzanium that went down with the ship or something?) to the condition of the wreck (even the glass dome was still partially intact!), but I think that's part of what makes it appealing - it's almost like a kind of science fiction film.

The effects aren't great but the final scenes where she finally makes it to New York City are brilliant.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

[Michael H. Standart]

I won't be too hard on the special effects. It looks a bit cheesy now but back when the film was made, it was cutting edge stuff.

But the story? Forget it!

The book....not surprisingly...was a LOT better and at least Clive Cussler was brutally honest when he said "My books have no literary value!"