A Night to Remember

Credited as the ‘most accurate depiction’ of the events of the Titanic on-screen, A Night to Remember is a documentary directed by Roy Ward Baker. Adapted from Walter Lord’s 1955 book of the same name, it offers a to-the-minute account of the disaster.

The film captures the events with great detail through brilliant effects and set design, including multiple miniatures of the ship in its various stages of sinking, overlaid on top of passengers escaping on lifeboats. Scenes where the ship is listing were achieved by tilting the set itself, causing creaking noises that were edited over other shots of the boat listing. It mistakenly depicts the ship as intact when it was discovered that the ship split in two when the wreckage was found in 1985.

Baker captures the attitudes and behaviour onboard as the ship began to sink, with many of the men holding onto the belief that they would be fine, incorrectly assuming that the ship had enough lifeboats. The film captures the chaos as the truth sets in, from those playing poker in the lobby, to women refusing to board the lifeboats, to others barging past each other to get to a boat.

A Night to Remember displays how the overwhelming sentiment aboard the ship was one where people felt invincible, on board an ‘unsinkable’ vessel and unable to comprehend that the ship was in fact sinking and they didn’t have enough resources to survive. It highlights multiple failures from many people, a failure to provide enough lifeboats, poor navigation and emergency protocol, with the passengers becoming rowdy and pushing past each other to get onto the lifeboats or holding people up by refusing. One of the lifeboats is only loaded to half its capacity, meaning about twenty more people could have been saved. The Californian, the ship closest to the Titanic at the time of its sinking, did not come to anyone’s aid despite multiple distress flares.

2023’s OceanGate Titan submersible implosion en route to the Titanic wreckage has given new relevance to A Night To Remember and the Titanic as a cautionary tale. A whistleblower has revealed to the courts how he thinks the implosion was caused by OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush’s arrogance, failing to cooperate with third-party professionals to ensure the safety of its passengers. This coincides with the Titanic’s own safety concerns, mainly its inadequate number of lifeboats, but namely a similar level of hubris and arrogance between the people involved with and on-board the Titanic as well as Rush, which resulted in the deaths of their passengers and crew.

Published 6 Nov 2024