YMMV / A Night to Remember

• Adaptation Displacement:
  • The 1958 film has pretty much overshadowed the existence of the book it was based on. Really, the only reason most people even know of the book is thanks to the film's promotional material mentioning it. (Except for Titanic buffs, for whom author Walter Lord's A Night to Remember and follow-up book The Night Lives On are basically unofficial Bibles.)
  • Prior to the movie a live NBC television version was done in 1956. While forgotten today, it was a huge production and was well received earning an Emmy Award for its live camera work. The whole program has thankfully survived and is available online here.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: This film popularized the theory that the iceberg cut a 300-foot gash in the Titanic. While this made sense based on the information that was available in 1958, it was ultimately disproved after the wreck was discovered in 1985.
• Narm: Most of the death scenes are horrific. However, the scream overdub for the first man who jumps into the ocean is just a little too dramatic to be taken seriously.
• Retroactive Recognition: Desmond Llewelyn, best known as Q from the James Bond films, appears as a crewman at a locked steerage gate.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The brief scene with the Strausses. Mister Strauss refuses to go unless all the other men are off, and gently urges Mrs. Strauss to go. Her response? "We have been together for so many years. Where you go, I do."
  • Even worse when they are shown during the ship’s final moments, struggling to stay together as crowds of panicing passengers push past them. They look frightened and confused, not knowing what to do. It gets worse when you realise that Isidors body was recovered, whilst Ida was not. Meaning that at some point during the ship’s final plunge, they got separated.
  • The scenes with the Steerage passengers are a combination of this and sheer unbridled horror.
  • An elderly man comforts a boy who has lost his mother, knowing full well that they are doomed. He shelters the boy in his arms until they perish.
  • Even some passengers who make it to the lifeboats perish afterwards. In one scene just before their rescue by the RMS Carpathia, a Welshman tries to awaken his friend who has frozen to death.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Due to the progression of gender equality in the decades since both the actual sinking and the making of this movie, Lightoller's refusal to allow men to escape the sinking can come across as quite disturbing to modern viewers. However later on in the film it's shown that one of the officers does in fact allow men on board some of the boats.
  • The fact that the evacuations were done by class, meaning that even third-class women and children were kept below-decks and largely uninformed of the danger until the vast majority of boats had already been launched. What makes the whole thing even worse is that in the real sinking, some of the officers (including Lightoller) launched several lifeboats early on at less-than-full capacity (one infamously only carrying a dozen passengers plus the rowers)...because they couldn't find enough 1st and 2nd class women and children on deck to fill them.
• Vindicated by History: The film was a money loser when it premiered in 1958. However, now it is rivaled only by James Cameron's film as the best dramatization of the disaster. Even today, with the hindsight of the fact that Titanic actually did split before she sank, the sheer accuracy that goes into the sinking scene is stunning.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Though not as spectacular as the ones in James Cameron's, the effects were absolutely groundbreaking for the 1950s and hold up relatively well even today, especially during the sinking scene.
  • For a specific example, there are several uses of a Dutch Angle later in the film to demonstrate the increasing angle of the ship as it fills with water. However, instead of simply tilting the camera, this effect was achieved by tilting the entire set. This makes the effect much more realistic by making the actors actually have to compensate for the tilted floor, and allows for effects which would have been otherwise impossible such as the slanted water in a drinking glass.

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