Most critics admire the film, and for the same reason: it keeps its head. Nine of eleven reviews are positive, and the praise gathers around its restraint, its documentary manner and its choice of hundreds of ordinary people over an invented hero. Roy Ward Baker’s direction is singled out for holding intimate scenes and the sinking itself in the same steady frame, and the British ensemble, with Kenneth More at its centre, is thought well used. Several reviews call it the best screen account of the Titanic.
The reservations are small and scattered: dated effects, a cast so large that few characters develop, a couple of historical myths repeated as fact. The spread is wide all the same, from full marks to plain dislike, and the dissent comes from the film’s own era. The New Yorker, on release, finds the story too familiar to build suspense. The warmest notices arrive around the 2012 centenary.
