Roy Ward Baker’s account of the Titanic’s one voyage is calm, procedural and, for that reason, upsetting. The model work has aged and a few passengers are sketches, but Kenneth More’s Lightoller and Eric Ambler’s careful script make it the version to see.
Everyone knows how this ends, and Roy Ward Baker’s film does not pretend otherwise. There is no invented romance, no villain twirling a moustache in first class, no attempt to make the iceberg a surprise. Eric Ambler’s screenplay, taken from Walter Lord’s book, treats the sinking as a night’s work done by a great many people at once, and follows the work. The ship strikes ice well before the hour is out. The remaining ninety-odd minutes are given to what happens between the impact and the water, and we did not once want them shorter.
Kenneth More is the nearest thing to a lead, and he plays Lightoller as a man with a job rather than a man with a destiny. He loads boats, argues about numbers, tells people to hurry in a voice that never quite rises. It is a performance made of small decisions, and it holds the film together because everything else keeps moving away from it. Baker cuts to the bridge, the wireless room, the boiler rooms, the steerage gates and back, and Sidney Hayers keeps the clock in our heads throughout; we always know roughly how much time is left and how little has been done with it.
What got at us was not the water. It was the ship on the horizon. A few miles off, the Californian has stopped for the night, and its wireless operator switches off his set and goes to bed. Later its officers stand on deck and watch white rockets go up over the dark and wonder what they are for. Baker keeps returning to them, and each time the gap between what they can see and what they decide to do grows a little wider. We were angry in a way the film never is, which is the point of the restraint.
Geoffrey Unsworth shoots it in black and white, and lights the boat deck as if only the ship’s own lamps were on, so the sea around the hull is simply black and the people on it are small and pale. William Alwyn’s score is generous over the departure and then almost absent once the ship is holed; the band on deck carries the music from there, and the choice of what they play is left to do its work without underlining. Yvonne Caffin puts first class into furs over nightdresses and steerage into the clothes they have been wearing for a week, and that alone tells us who was given time to pack.
The cast around More is large and mostly good in the way British character actors of the period were good: quickly, without fuss. Michael Goodliffe’s Thomas Andrews walks about telling people to put on their lifebelts in the tone of a man recommending a coat. Kenneth Griffith’s Phillips stays at his key. Anthony Bushell, as Captain Rostron of the Carpathia, turns his ship round and starts swinging out boats and rigging lights in a sequence that moved us more than we expected, because it is the one stretch where competence is rewarded. Honor Blackman has a few scenes as a mother getting her children dressed. Robert Ayres and James Dyrenforth, as two of the more prominent American passengers, get a line each that lands.
Some of them get little else. The Clarkes, a honeymoon couple in second class, are written to a pattern we have seen before, and Ronald Allen and Jill Dixon cannot do a great deal with it. The stiff upper lip is admired once or twice more than it is examined. And the effects have aged. The wide shots of the hull tilting in a studio tank look like a hull tilting in a studio tank, and a modern viewer will notice. We minded less than we thought we would, because the film keeps cutting back to a face before the model has time to embarrass itself.
James Cameron’s Titanic spent its money on the water. This one spends its attention on the people looking at it, and it remains the account we would send someone to first. Two hours and three minutes, PG, and nothing in it a twelve-year-old could not follow. Watch it in a quiet room with the sound up. Its loudest moments are people declining to shout.
