'Titanic' on Film

ISSUE 60 ISSUE SCREEN EDUCATION SCREEN 46 BRIAN MCFARlANE ‘ThIS ShIp’S UNSINkABlE!’: ThE TiTanic ON FIlM Brian McFarlane considers the enduring fascination with this maritime disaster and reflects on some its finest and not-so-fine cinematic renderings. here is a breathtaking moment in Noël Coward’s play Cavalcade T when a young couple, on the deck of an Atlantic liner, are talking about the prospect of their lives together: ‘This is our moment – complete and heavenly,’ says the young woman. As they make to move inside, she picks up her shawl, which has been hanging over a rail. It has been covering a lifebelt and when they walk away the ship’s name on it is revealed: S.S. Titanic.1 Frank Lloyd’s 1933 Oscar-winning film version of the same OppOsite page: Mr and Mrs Clarke (ronald allen and Jill dixon) in A Night to name reproduced this moment without remember abOve: The titanic seTs sail in 1912 ) comment; no comment was needed because the awful implications would tory and, more specifically, its repeated would be enough; rich man and humble have been obvious to all viewers. And the surfacings (perhaps an unfortunate meta- Irish immigrant died together with de- moment had not lost its power to move in phor) in popular cinema. grees of heroism and cowardice that had a 1995 revival of the play in London. nothing to do with the rigidly separated In spite of the two devastating world classes to which they belonged. This year’s exhibition of artefacts from the wars that have occurred since the Titanic ship at the Melbourne Museum proved went down in the North Atlantic on its how far do the film versions of theTitan - hugely popular, with viewing queues as- maiden voyage in 1912, as well as nu- ic’s last hours go towards finding expla- sembled every quarter of an hour to merous other tales of horror, few stories nations for the ongoing fascination with maintain some sort of order and to avoid can still chill the blood, in my case at this nearly 100-year-old disaster? It is, of overcrowding. Vast numbers of people least, the way that of the Titanic does. In course, not just films: there are dozens of made their slow way past recreations of this study, I want to pursue some of the other responses to the Titanic in histori- the ship’s departure, through the gran- recurring features of the films that grap- cal accounts, novels, books for children, deur of the recreated first-class hallway, ple with the story of the unsinkable a book based on the recipes of its first- the grand staircase and a first-class cab- floating palace: the appallingly smug class dining room,3 sheet music memori- in, through the comparative austerities of confidence in material achievement; the alising the numbers played by the band4 the third-class hallway and a third-class blatant class distinctions underlined in and plays such as Coward’s and ernest cabin, and through galleries displaying an the contrasting treatment of those who’d raymond’s The Berg.5 In introducing the extraordinary range of surviving artefacts, paid fabulous sums for staterooms and video version of Atlantic, e.A. Dupont’s from silver serving dishes to a child’s those who were herded together in 1929 version of raymond’s play, David marbles.2 Most moving of all was the steerage; the collapse of a whole era McCallum (who played wireless operator memorial gallery where the names of the and its complacencies in a few hours. As harold Bride in Baker’s 1958 film) 60 ISSUE passengers were listed on wall charts, Second Officer Lightoller (Kenneth More) claimed: ‘No other historical event would making abundantly clear the stark differ- says in A Night to Remember (roy Ward inspire so many books and films.’6 This SCREEN EDUCATION SCREEN ence in survival rates between those in Baker, 1958): ‘I don’t think I’ll ever feel may be an extravagant claim, but cer- first, second and third class. The long sure again – about anything’, a remark tainly the Titanic disaster has had a re- queues snaking their way to admission that pinpoints the symbolic significance markable afterlife, suggesting that its sig- made me ponder the significance of the of this tragedy. Never again would any- nificance does resonate well beyond the Titanic disaster in twentieth-century his- one be certain that wealth and name details of the particular occasion. 47 BRIAN MCFARlANE ‘ThIS ShIp’S UNSINkABlE!’: ThE TiTanic ON FIlM Left: rose (kaTe WinsleT) and JaCk (leonardo diCaprio) in titanic OppOsite page: liz luCas (honor BlaCkMan), roBerT luCas (John Merivale) and Children in A Night to remember natural hazard; man has not effectively brought nature under full submission and the awareness of this accounts for Lightoller’s remark quoted above. AtlAntic Dupont, a major émigré figure in British film history with a background in Ger- man expressionist filmmaking in the 1920s, had scored a success with his last silent film in Britain,Piccadilly (1929), and Atlantic was his first sound film. As Tim Bergfelder writes, ‘although obvi- ously modelled on the fate of the Titanic, the name of the ship was changed for le- gal reasons’.8 One of the most expensive films of its time, it opens on a forward tracking shot of the ocean liner plough- ing its way through the sea, then cutting to brief shots of life on board, first of the crew and then of passengers at the bar or playing cards. ‘What a lovely night,’ says one passenger, just before Captain Collins (Gordon James) is heard to say, ‘I don’t want my passengers needlessly worried.’ The sense of nature’s ominous potential and the cheerful pleasure-lov- ing qualities of the passengers, signified in the cheerful music of the ship’s band, are hinted at from the film’s start. Watching/re-watching four of these films ing viewer interest until the catastrophe There are three couples at the film’s nar- – Dupont’s Atlantic, Jean Negulesco’s strikes, and the four films I am concen- rative centre: wheelchair-bound John Titanic (1953), Baker’s A Night to trating on all do so to varying degrees rool (Franklin Dyall) and wife Alice Remember and James Cameron’s and with varying success. (Ellaline Terriss), who go down with the Titanic (1997) – led me to wonder, per- ship together, she refusing to leave him; haps not very originally, about the effect The central narrative fact of all these the philandering Freddie Tate-hughes of a widely known tragic ending on their films is – and must be – that this sup- (D.A. Clarke-Smith) and resentful wife narrative procedures. It presumably posedly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg Clara (helen haye), who are reconciled means that the filmmaker has to keep on its maiden voyage and more than at the end; and the young couple Moni- the audience’s interest in other matters, 1500 lives were lost as a consequence. ca (Madeleine Carroll) and Larry (John aware that there is no possibility of the There are some recurring elements in Stuart), who are on their honeymoon. maritime cavalry’s coming to the rescue the films’ treatment of this basic sce- These three couples will find echoes in at the last minute; that the outcome is nario: the build-up to the appearance the character patterns and outcomes inescapably dreadful. I’m not referring of the iceberg; the inadequacy of the of the later films. Tension is built up in here to purely documentary films that, lifeboats (their numbers absurdly deter- these pairs, but more crucially between through arrangement and selection of mined by the ship’s capacity in cubic the crew’s increasing knowledge of im- facts, are aiming at an authentic account feet, not by numbers of passengers7), minent disaster and the need to main- of the events they chronicle, but to fic- the ‘women-and-children-first’ mantra, tain the passengers’ sense of security ISSUE 60 ISSUE tion films that take a real-life event as a couples both old and newly married as long as possible. starting point. In classical tragedy we refusing to be parted, card players still tend to expect and to be moved by what at the table as the ship starts to sink, Dupont, a director not much heard of SCREEN EDUCATION SCREEN has befallen individuals rather than by the band’s playing ‘Nearer, My God, today, doesn’t shy away from melodra- mass catastrophe. It is not surprising, to Thee’ as the ship goes down – and ma in his treatment of what is plainly then, that filmmakers have tended either many more such touches. Underpinning based on a real-life catastrophe. But to invent or to focus on personal stories, them all is the incredulity at the idea of while the disaster elements such as the on relationships, as a means of captur- the floating palace’s vulnerability to a collapse of the great ship’s hull are well 48 BRIAN MCFARlANE ‘ThIS ShIp’S UNSINkABlE!’: ThE TiTanic ON FIlM enough staged, there is something curi- ously under-populated about the film at large. Its dramatic action seems, for much of its length, little more than a se- ries of discrete scenes, highlighting first this, then that couple or individual, and the effect is somewhat as if we were watching episodes from a play, with each of the ‘moments’ admittedly making its impact, but rather as if in a vacu- um. however, as the news of impending disaster spreads and the first intima- tions of fear are felt, the tension does grow, and Dupont’s direction acquires a mounting rhythm in which the personal and the huge power of the elements are caught in inescapable tandem.

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