A World Worth Remembering

A Night to Remember

An acquaintance of mine recently wondered aloud where all the historical films have gone. Since I don’t keep track of what Hollywood is doing right now—I am uninterested in comic-book superheroes turned into dark lords of violence and computer-generated noise and nonsense—I hadn’t known that the genre had disappeared. I should have suspected it. From the days of Sir Walter Scott till 1960 at least, the historical novel was popular fare for people who didn’t go in for Tolstoy or Balzac. It was a way of indulging a taste for old things without having to pick your way through precisely researched historiography. You could set down your Francis Parkman and read James Fenimore Cooper.

The appeal of the historical is akin to the appeal of traveling to a strange and faraway place. Whenever I meet someone who comes from a part of the world where I’ve never been, I ask a lot of questions. What’s the weather like? How do you get around those mountains? What does that strange fruit taste like? How do people get their boats down those rapids? How does a man ask a woman to marry him? And on and on. They are human things, and I am a man, so why should they not interest me?

The same goes for people in the past. But if you are encouraged to despise your own forefathers for the vices they had or the vices you are pleased to believe they had, why should you pay any mind to how they lived? Why should you care about Chancellorsville, say, when you’ve been taught to consider both the Union and the Confederacy as irredeemably racist and contemptible?

A More Circumspect Respect

We Christians should not indulge such stolidness of mind, hardness of heart, and ingratitude. It’s the more urgent for us, rather, to encourage in ourselves and our children a warm regard for people whose vices we are probably not tempted to fall into, but whose considerable virtues, particularly courage and self-denial, we almost certainly lack. The historical novel or film, aside from the inherent fascination that great events should arouse, can remind us of the energy, the skill, the perseverance, and the foresight that people needed just to live from one winter to another, and it can stir in us, even when the author or the director has no such thing in mind, a desire to emulate that nobility of action and feeling that may as well come to us by the sudden grace of God, so foreign is it to anything we might imagine on our own.

With these things in mind, I recommend the platinum standard for films about a historical catastrophe: A Night to Remember (1958). The director, Roy Ward Baker, who later on directed many a horror film, had the good sense to understand that if you’re filming the sinking of the Titanic, you don’t need to exaggerate, you don’t need an overbearing score, you had better not clot up the film with irrelevant romance, and you need not deliver blows to the head to make a lot of social commentary. That last will come through with a few touches that will be all the more powerful for their being few, and ominous.

Black and white, not color, is the better medium, because you will remember the darkness of sky and sea, the artificial and all-too-transient brightness of the upper-class ballroom with its crystal glasses and silver cutlery, and the power of the human face, as men and women and children, of all classes, many of whom do not speak English, come to realize that death is near. Less is more, when the iceberg looms.

The film is shot mainly from the point of view of second lieutenant Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More), the man most responsible for the orderly transfer of passengers—women and children first—to the lifeboats. Lightoller managed to survive, as he with several other British sailors struggled aboard the last boat in the cold waters as the ship was sinking beneath them. More would later play Father Brown, with excellent understatement and human feeling, in a series for the BBC; he is perfect here for Lightoller.

So is Laurence Naismith as Captain Smith of the Titanic, sober, only a tad too confident when the ice fields were reported early on that terrible evening, but, when the crisis came, calmly and sadly decisive. So is Michael Goodliffe as the designer of the ship, Thomas Andrews, the first man to know, with what he calls mathematical certainty, that the ship is going down. He explains it to the captain almost as if he were going through the steps of a geometric proof, showing him that the first three watertight compartments are filling with water, that the fourth must soon go, and that, unfortunately, that means that the boat will sink by the head, and the angle will cause the water to flood into the shorter and less secure fifth and sixth compartments. It must sink, he says, because it can’t float.

Andrews will not even attempt to survive. We need not hear him moaning about miscalculations, or about the fact that the British had not stocked the Titanic with enough lifeboats. His face shows the guilt. Talk is cheap.

Many a scene shows us that the Titanic might well have been sailing on another planet as on what would become ours now. The leader of the band dismisses his men not long before the ship will go under, but as they walk off a little way, he stays at his spot and begins to play, on his violin, the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” to the achingly beautiful melody Horbury. His fellows hear, and they return to him and play, and the man on the cello sings out the hymn, and his voice can be heard above the cries, the shouts, the confusion, the weeping, even by the people on the lifeboats.

As the ship at last slides to the bottom of the abyss, the women on the lifeboats begin to pray, and you can hear it in various languages—the Lord’s Prayer; and Jewish people pray, I believe, the Kaddish. The behavior of the British sailors is characterized by that taciturn feint at cheer that is not hypocritical but a real act of self-restraining charity, because the last thing you want is to have even the tone of your voice give anyone a heavier burden to bear.

An Honest Drama

The women and children must be the first to save, but that doesn’t mean that all the men were manly. Some, we see, were cowards; and some women, especially the elderly, refused to go, preferring to die with their husbands. Each of the lifeboats had to be manned by at least two sailors, so some men were saved that way; and the first lifeboats sent over the side were not quite full; and it is true that the first-class passengers had a much better chance of survival than did the passengers in the steerage.

Some dreadful errors were made, and the film shows them to us, without needless emphasis: the captain of a nearby ship, the California, ignored the Titanic’s distress signals, and a crucial message from ships west of the Titanic, reporting on the dangerous icebergs, never got to the bridge, in part because it was buried by telegraph messages having to do with a foolish speed race on the morrow. But in general, we see many acts of heroism and intelligence, and that matter-of-fact manliness that cannot really disappear from the earth, so long as there are still men, and so long as God is merciful to us.

I could say much more: the shots of the now empty interior, listing; the old man hugging the lost little boy to comfort him in the last moments before death; the sudden scenes where all you hear is the groaning of wood and iron; the click-click of telegraph messages that might spell doom or salvation. A Night to Remember is to its successor, the absurdly overrated Titanic (1997), as a Stonewall Jackson or William Sherman is to Spiderman, if you add to Spiderman a sufficient dose of moral looseness, self-satisfaction, and stupidity. This is a movie for your older children. Let it be their entry into what was our world.