‘A Night to Remember’ or — Surface Tension?
All I could remember about ‘A Night to Remember’ (1958) was that it starred Kenneth More and that a ship sank in it. And that’s it. Oh, and that the Titanic went down in one piece as opposed to breaking as in two as in Cameron’s version but not much more than that.
Yet what stayed with me most about the movie from all those years ago were the aesthetics of the cinematography; the way the pitch black of the sky and sea contrasted against the white of ice and points of electric light. Death and hope? Revisiting the film last week what struck me with the force of an unexpected iceberg wasn’t just the look of the movie but how that look is handled, how the camera moves and when/how it doesn’t and when THINGS move and don’t. There’s a level of control going here that’s thrilling, unnerving and utterly precise. And it all starts with a pencil.
We all know the story — ship meet cutes iceberg, calamity ensues and everyone jumps into the water like a large scale version of kid’s TV show ‘We are the Champions’ except without Ton Pickering shouting “Away you go!” But let’s get back to that pencil.
The entire build up in ‘A Night to Remember’ pretty much revolves around how steady the Titanic is. A passenger demonstrates this over dinner by standing a pencil on its end on his dinner plate where it stands perfectly still, moving not a jot. It’s almost unnatural! And it IS unnatural, all of it. The Titanic cuts through the water without a single quiver, as though it is the ocean that is moving around IT. Chandeliers hang motionless, dinner trolleys are defiantly stationary and, in one of the most unnerving shots I’ve seen, the camera pushes in towards a rocking horse that’s as immobile as stone. Rocking horses are suppose to rock (aren’t they?), especially at sea, so the simple act of viewing this motionless children’s toy whilst armed with the knowledge of what is going to happen is truly nerve-racking and breath-holding. It feels as though the Titanic and everything on board is violating the laws of physics and there will, must, be a cost for such a transgression.
Director Roy Baker deliberately keeps this denial of mobility at the perfect level, even after the iceberg hits. And then, in a truly terrifying moment, we witness that immovable dinner trolley slowly trundle away from us and we are hit with the realisation of having reached a point of no return. Christ!
Not long later terror turns into horror when the Captain orders the firearms to be broken out because humanity could be about to sink along with the ship. This is also when the orchestra kicks in, deliberately having been held back until this moment of maximum terror where it can be utilised for maximum impact. This is one scary movie!
Except for the fact that ‘A Night to Remember’ also had me laughing my ass off, because this is also an incredibly funny movie, too.
The humour primarily comes in the form of the ship’s cook who, whilst everyone else is running about in pant-shitting panic, accepts his fate, puts his feet up and cracks open a bottle of scotch. After a while he is motivated to get up and do something, mainly because he’s run out of booze as opposed to self-preservation. So he gets to his feet and unsteadily (EVERYTHING is unsteady now) stumbles through corridors packed with panicking passengers, the camera moving with him almost as though it is physically connected to him by an invisible rope, both swaying in perfect unison back and forth, to and fro, ignoring the pandemonium surrounding them both. It’s an incredibly effective way to put us directly into his shoes.
Once on deck he throws some life preservers into the water below yet before he can jump down onto his makeshift raft he watches some poor drowning dude make off with them instead. He watches this, sees the existential joke of it all and merrily walks off with a grin on his face. I was struggling for breath I was laughing so hard. I’d like to see James Cameron balance tragedy and laugh-out-loud comedy like that!
There’s so much to say about this movie but I’d risk going on for hours. There’s the striking cinematography where those blacks and whites make you feel the remote coldness of it all. Then there’s the wonderful humour revolving around class and snobbery. There’s the tension of distant observers misreading signals. Or how about when Thomas Andrews, the Titanic’s designer literally sees his world collapse about him and it feels like the end of civilisation? And just look at how the camera is still gliding at precisely the perfect moments and with such controlled grace!
And keep an ear out for the sound design, too, which is as impactful as what we witness. The musical score is, correctly, frequently held back allowing the sound design to dominate, whether it is the VROOSH!! of luminous signal flares punctuating the silent blackness or the off-screen screams, which are more terrifying than anything we see, as we hear countless people jumping to their deaths. At the end, as the Titanic sinks, these screams merge with the grinding of metal and the churning of the waters into one, almost hellish sounding whole as the ship finally goes under.
‘A Night to Remember’ is almost perfect, impeccable, faultless and executed with total skill, care, intelligence, style and humanity. It was the second Roy Baker film I had seen in that week, the other being the true WW II story ‘The One That Got Away’ and both of them had me sitting there in absolute awe of what Baker had managed to achieve — to make movies of stories where we know what is going to happen yet the end product is one of intense and blistering excitement. I think this movie might be a masterpiece.
