For Those in Peril on the Screen

Point-of-view is vital to telling a good story.  A compelling idea, interesting characters…they can all be wasted if a movie is told from the wrong perspective.  There’s no better way to see this in action than looking at cinematic doppelgangers, two movies made about the same subject at nearly the same time.  Whether it’s Armageddon vs. Deep Impact or Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano, looking at movies like this offers a compelling way to understand why some movies work and others don’t, even if they have the same good idea at their core.

I recently came across another case of this unexpectedly when I suggested watching the 1958 movie, A Night to Remember.

“Is that the Barbara Stanwyck movie?” my companion asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

A quick check on the movie’s Wikipedia page showed that Stanwyck wasn’t involved.  However, when we mentioned the movie to someone else the next day, the first thing out of the person’s mouth was:

“With Barbara Stanwyck?”

I found myself perplexed.  Why were multiple people asking about Barbara Stanwyck, of all people?  Well, a quick jump to her IMDB page revealed what was causing the confusion: in 1953, Stanwyck starred in a very different movie about the same maritime disaster, appropriately called Titanic.

Of course, the sinking of the Titanic has shown up in plenty of movies, so wasn’t a tremendous surprise to find another one.  Doubtlessly, almost everyone is aware of James Cameron’s 1997 epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, but there are many more.  Indeed, the first movie about the doomed ocean liner was shot in 1912, the same year as the sinking itself (it stars actress Dorothy Gibson, who survived the actual sinking herself).  In the 1940s, the Nazi government made another film as anti-British propaganda.

What’s remarkable about 1953’s Titanic and 1958’s A Night to Remember is not that two movies were made about the same event, but that despite being four decades removed from the disaster, they were made so close to one another without an obvious anniversary or milestone to gin up interest.  In fact, the height of the post-war era is a fascinating time for these movies to be made.  At the time, the sinking was far enough in the past that it was very old news, but recent enough that there were still a significant number of survivors of the actual event (in A Night to Remember’s case, one of the ship’s surviving officers served as a technical consultant).

So, I decided to look further, to compare how each movie handles an objectively captivating story set against a horrifying tragedy.  The contrast reveals an important insight about storytelling and what audiences will respond to.

First, let’s lay out what the movies have in common:

Both are shot in black & white, both were advertised (as every Titanic movie probably is) by highlighting the inherent tension of the real-life tragedy, and both balance the human drama of a small number of passengers with a single crewmember character we follow to keep us clued in on the moment-by-moment progression of the sinking (Captain Smith in Titanic and Second Officer Lightoller in A Night to Remember).  Both movies also received a measure of critical acclaim at the time of their release, with Titanic winning an Academy Award for its screenplay and A Night to Remember, being a British production, won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.  Finally, simply because these movies were made so close together, they share a great deal of cinematic aesthetics and filmmaking techniques, especially when it comes to cinematography and special effects.

Largely, that is where the similarities end.

Truth be told, 1953’s Titanic has a lot in common with the 1997 James Cameron movie of the same name.  In each case, the central plot features fictional romances set against the backdrop of the historical event.  Like Cameron’s film, 1953’s Titanic is also fronted with a lot of big stars from the era.  Obviously, there was Barbara Stanwyck, but there are also stars like Clifton Webb and Thelma Ritter, actors who were popular enough to be featured in all of the advertisements I could find.  Titanic also features a very young, very dashing Robert Wagner.

In contrast, A Night to Remember has only one named star, Kenneth More, and he was never as big a draw as Barbara Stanwyck.

A Night to Remember largely sticks to the true stories mined from the 1955 book it was based on, a factual retelling of the event based on interviews with survivors and extensive historical research.  This shows through in A Night to Remember’s wider-ranging focus, moving between passengers in all three of the ship’s classes and highlighting many real-life anecdotes (such as the ship’s baker, who gets drunk when he learns the ship is sinking and miraculously survived the freezing water).  While there are characters who love each other in A Night to Remember, there are no Romeo & Juliet-style doomed romances or tragic coincidences beyond those which actually happened.

Titanic, meanwhile, is mostly fictional.  The plot concerns Barbara Stanwyck’s character trying to flee with her son (Norman) and daughter (Annette) to America to escape her card-playing rapscallion of a husband played by Clifford Webb. 

Meanwhile, fresh-faced Robert Wagner tries to woo Annette for himself.

Titanic continually checks in with the ship’s Captain, E.J. Smith, who is one of the few real people featured in the movie.  Many tropes of Titanic lore are included, such as an executive of the White Star Line urging Captain Smith to travel at high speed to capture headlines in New York, or a “new money” millionaire whose brash attitude rubs others in first class the wrong way. 

Here, however, this executive is not Bruce Ismay, the actual head of the White Star Line who became infamous after surviving the sinking, nor is the brash “new money” the irrepressible Molly Brown who famously took charge of the lifeboat she was on when the crew member proved he wasn’t up to the challenge.  In Titanic, we don’t get the real people and their fascinating stories.  Instead, they’ve been fictionalized and reduced to minor side characters whose actions differ wildly from their real-life counterparts.

The reasons for this approach is obvious.  Changing names allows the screenwriters to largely tell the story they want to tell.  We don’t know what will happen to these people, and they’re allowed to be as boorish or heroic as the storytellers desire.  There is a kind of freedom that comes with breaking away from the reality of the events.

A Night to Remember’s story, meanwhile, is largely dictated by what actually happened.  Its pace is inextricably linked to the timeline of occurrences the night Titanic sank, and the tension is by necessity drawn the situation itself; the drama is born from how the real people onboard dealt with their circumstances. 

Back on 1953's Titanic, a recurring plotline involves Robert Wagner and Annette dancing with each other, first after dinner and then again the next day on the promenade deck (he teaches her to do a particularly offensive jig called the “Navajo Rag”). A lot of time is dedicated to side plots like this, so the ship doesn’t actually strike the iceberg until well into the film’s second half.  It uses all of this time to set up the storylines, such as a drunk, recently defrocked priest traveling home in shame, an annoying social climber annoying John Jacob Astor, and Annette’s desire to stay with her father instead of her mother. Titanic is far more interested in its colorful assortment of largely fictional characters than it is with the sinking itself.

Despite a title card highlighting its accuracy, Titanic is woefully unconcerned with facts when they get in the way of the story it prefers to tell.  For example, near the beginning of the film, Clifton Webb is trying to get onboard, only to be informed that the ship has been sold out since March (the Titanic left port in April).  In truth, the real Titanic was barely half-full of passengers (imagine how many more people would have died if it had been sold out).  That's just one example of a litany of inaccuracies throughout Titanic’s runtime.

This approach of character over plot and setting is not inherently bad. There are many great stories that use it. So, it's particularly useful that it was made so close to another movie on the same subject which took a drastically different approach.

While A Night to Remember is more limited by its fidelity, this actually becomes its greatest strength.  There is something to be said for restraint.  A Night to Remember understands that the most interesting part of the Titanic’s story is the impossible situation it created for those onboard.  We see characters act with cowardice and grace, kindness and fear.  We learn just enough about these characters to empathize with them, to become invested in their struggle to survive.

The biggest artistic flourish in A Night to Remember is the addition of a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, and their three children.  These are the rare fictional characters in the movie.  Yet, even here, A Night to Remember is incredibly restrained.  The Lucas family are composites of several actual passengers, and some of their dialogue is drawn directly from things the real people onboard were purported to have said. 

By all appearances, this change wasn’t made to sensationalize the story as those in Titanic were. Instead, they're clearly meant to create a more cohesive, easy-to-follow throughline that summarizes the experiences of real people onboard the ship.  It’s clear that, to the makers of A Night to Remember, the events of that night are inherently dramatic enough, whereas the creators behind Titanic felt the need to juice the story using soap opera theatrics and all-too-convenient coincidences.

This isn’t to say that Titanic is totally without merit.  The first half of the movie isn’t particularly noteworthy, but there is some good drama near the end.  The drunken, defrocked priest does show his inner character with a moment of compassionate sacrifice, and the true horror of the sinking is used to good effect as families are wrenched apart.  Throughout most of the movie, Barbara Stanwyck’s performance is snobbish and over-the-top, but her cries of anguish when she realizes that her son Norman has given up his seat in the lifeboat are truly affecting.

Another example begins earlier in the movie when Stanwyck tells Clifton Webb that Norman isn’t actually his son, but the product of a one-night affair.  Webb spends most of the rest of the movie pushing poor Norman away without saying why.  Yet, when the two find each other on the deck of the ship, Webb can’t help but act like a comforting father to the child he has only just realized wasn’t his.  The two of them clutch each other, and it’s in moments like this where Titanic works best.

All that being said, while it has its moments, Titanic just doesn’t manage to hit the emotional highs that A Night to Remember does.  There’s a scene in A Night to Remember where a steward finds a lost boy on the deck crying for his mother.  The steward takes up the child and comforts him until the ship finally sinks.  It’s smaller and quieter, and it’s utterly heartbreaking.  There are numerous characters we care about, not just a few who were created for us. Here, we know that they're either real people or close representations of real people, and it's deeply meaningful to see them wrestle with the awful events that unfold around them.

Then there’s the Californian, the steamer that was within sight of Titanic as it sank yet did nothing to help.  This is one of those events that only further heightens the real horror of what happened that night.  It’s the kind of "truth is stranger than fiction" anecdote that, if it appeared in a novel it would seem like an over-the-top flourish.  Over the course of A Night to Remember, we periodically see the crew of the Californian making the tragic errors in judgment that potentially cost hundreds of people their lives.  Conversely, Titanic is so myopic in its storytelling that it never even mentions this aspect of the disaster.  There is a tragedy unfolding in the mid-Atlantic, one that is all-too-real, and A Night to Remember knows to make that the focus of its story, not some overwrought melodrama.

The final major distinction between the two movies is technical.  In this regard, it is amazing at how well A Night to Remember holds up, especially when you compare it to Titanic.

Both movies were made around the same time, and Titanic had a budget more than three time that of A Night to Remember; however, clearly most of that money went to its stars, not the special effects.  In her review, Pauline Kael wrote that “the actual sinking looks like a nautical tragedy on the pond in Central Park,” and she was right.  The modelwork in Titanic looks tremendously fake.

A Night to Remember’s effects are dated, to be sure.  The model doesn’t look nearly as impressive as the effects we see in movies made in the decades since.  However, while it’s a far cry from what could be done today, the work in A Night to Remember was clearly done with a level of care and attention to detail that makes it far more effective.  The model ship looks larger and more impressive, the iceberg more threatening, and the sinking feels like an actual event instead of dropping a child’s toy in a swimming pool.

Our modern eyes have become jaded, and its harder for older effects to work on audiences in the way they once did.  Both movies lose some of their tension from the dated nature of their effects.  However, the contrast also shows that even while it’s imperfect, a good effect can still get you most of the way there if given the right time and attention.

Which is all to say that, when watched with modern eyes, one movie holds up much, much better than the other. A Night to Remember is a movie that still largely works.  It is told with spare, restrained performances that attempt to be as true-to-life as possible.  This has allowed it to age far more gracefully than Titanic, where the performances have an arch quality that, while popular at the time, feel tremendously dated now.

This retrospective analysis stands in contrast to the public reaction to the original releases.  At the time, Titanic did significantly better at the box office.  With a budget more than three times as large, it still managed to take in more than it cost to make, whereas A Night to Remember had yet to make back its original budget when the figures were last reported on in 2001.  Neither movie was a smash, especially if one accounts for marketing, but Titanic unquestionably did better business.

This is telling.  Please don’t take this to mean that audiences are dumb or lack sophistication.  That’s a tired argument that ignores numerous counterexamples going back more than a hundred years (look at how just last year, the three hour, R-rated historical drama Oppenheimer brought in nearly a billion dollars).  Movies with mass appeal are not inherently better or worse.

What this does speak to, instead, is to how marketing a story can make it easier to sell, but it's the execution that will make it last.

Everyone I spoke to knew the title A Night to Remember and that the movie was about the Titanic.  If one looks today, A Night to Remember is available from the Criterion Collection in a beautiful, loving remaster, and is well-spoken of by those interested in the sinking.  It’s frequently referenced as influencing those who remain interested in the sinking (including the director of the 1997 film, James Cameron, despite the fact that his movie is far closer to the 1953 movie in how it is told).  Titanic, meanwhile, is not well-remembered at all.  It’s been shown on TV enough times that lovers of old movies may have seen it. Even then, the most memorable thing about it seems to be that Barbara Stanwyck was in a movie about the Titanic, hardly a significant legacy.

There are few hard-and-fast rules for storytelling.  However, these two movies highlight something which is easy-to-forget: short-term popularity isn’t everything.

The comparison puts in stark contrast how vital it is to consider a story's setting with as much care as one gives the plot and its characters.  Both movies take place on the doomed ocean liner, and the sinking drives both narratives.

However, A Night to Remember is smart enough to know when to lean on the real events as opposed to trying to goose them with its own artistic flourishes.  It’s storytellers understood that the appeal of the Titanic is in the tragedy itself, particularly the life-and-death circumstances inherent to those events. 

It was a moment in history that highlighted the best and the worst that people have to offer; there’s no need to add another layer of artifice to make it more dramatic.  In fact, doing so can significantly lesson the impact of the story being told.

Storytelling is an art.  To do it well, it's important to know what it is in your story that's worth focusing on; which is the right part of the story to tell. This can make all the difference over whether or not yours is a story worthy of being remembered.