Frank Lawton, who plays J. Bruce Ismay, previously starred in 1933's Cavalcade, which also prominently featured the Titanic. On Titanic, First Class passengers Sir Richard and Lady Richard, and Second Class passengers, the Clarkes, a young newlywed couple, overhear the band, led by Wallace Hartley. The band plays various songs, while steerage passengers Pat Murphy, Martin Gallagher, and James Farrel enjoy a party in Third Class, where Murphy becomes attracted to a young Polish girl and dances with her.

Written in 1955 and partially based on interviews with survivors and families of the deceased, the book contradicts the standard narrative formed by the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Captain's suicide and the main heroine floating on the door, a vengeful husband and steerage passengers who craved to sneak into the first class - all were added for the dramatic effect. Lord is also a strong writer, which allows him to maintain the integrity of the personal observations of the survivors, while still delivering an exciting narrative. (It should be noted that Lord interviewed 63 survivors for A Night to Remember, and his letters with these men and women have become an important source for later Titanic historians). a b "Widow of Titanic Officer visits Chorley". Encyclopedia Titanica. 30 January 2005 . Retrieved 2 September 2017. A Night to Remember is novelistic in its presentation, eschewing analysis and debate. For instance, rather than engage in a discussion about the band's final song, Lord simply chooses the Episcopal hymn Autumn, instead of Nearer My God To Thee. If you desire to know why Lord made that choice, you can read his follow up The Night Lives On, which is an in-depth treatment of a number of fascinating (if ultimately meaningless) questions (including First Officer William Murdoch's alleged suicide, an event blithely passed off as gospel in Cameron's Titanic, much to the chagrin of Murdoch's surviving relatives). Several historical figures were renamed or went unnamed to avoid potential legal action. Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon and Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon are depicted as Sir Richard and Lady Richard (Lady Duff's secretary Miss Francatelli is completely omitted) and Bruce Ismay is referred to throughout only as "The Chairman".

Select a format:

The film won numerous awards, including a Golden Globe Award for Best English-Language Foreign Film, and received high praise from reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. [46] Box office [ edit ] There are probably other books that go into greater detail on certain aspects of this story, but I can't imagine there being a better entire book on the Titanic than this. Walter Lord had been very interested in the sinking of the RMS Titanic since he was child and wrote A Night to Remember while working as a copy editor at a New York ad agency. Lord interviewed over sixty survivors of the sinking and described in detail the events leading up to the Titanic striking the iceberg, the sinking and the rescue by the RMS Carpathia. The book also includes facts about the Titanic, a list of passengers with those that survived in italics and other information. In his book A Night to Remember, Walter Lord presented the Titanic disaster from the passengers and crew's viewpoints.

The film adaptation came about after its eventual director, Roy Ward Baker, and its producer, Belfast-born William MacQuitty, both acquired copies of the book -– Baker from his favorite bookshop and MacQuitty from his wife – and decided to obtain the film rights. MacQuitty succeeded in raising finance from John Davis at the Rank Organisation, who in the late 1950s were expanding into bigger-budgeted filmmaking. The job of directing was assigned to Roy Baker, who was under contract to Rank, and Baker recommended Ambler be given the job of writing the screenplay. [2] Lord was brought on board the production as a consultant. [19] Street, Sarah (2004). "Questions of Authenticity and Realism in A Night to Remember (1958)". In Bergfelder, Tim; Street, Sarah (eds.). The Titanic in myth and memory: representations in visual and literary culture. London: I.B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1-85043-431-3. David McCallum, who plays Harold Bride, would serve as the narrator for the 1994 A&E documentary mini-series Titanic: Death of a Dream and Titanic: The Legend Lives On.Anyway, this book of course is now eclipsed by Céline Dion singing My Heart Will Go On while standing bravely on the Titanic’s prow in our Collective Unconscious. Fitch, Tad; Layton, J. Kent; Wormstedt, Bill (2012). On A Sea of Glass: The Life & Loss of the R.M.S. Titanic. Amberley Books. ISBN 978-1848689275. Norman Rossington, who appears as a steward who loses his temper with non-English speaking passengers just after the collision, also appears as the Master-at-Arms in S.O.S. Titanic (1979).

Lord's interest was sparked when he travelled on Titanic's sister ship Olympic, when young (we learn in his book that the ship volunteered to collect survivors from Carpathia, but that it was felt the sight of Olympic might be too upsetting for those aboard) and he wrote the first serious account of the disaster. There had been personal accounts before then, but this took account of all of these reminiscences as well as including interviews with many survivors and the family's of those involved which makes it feel much more immediate.Celeste Cumming Mt. Lebanon, "Early Titanic Film A Movie to Remember", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (11 September 1998), p. 39. Some historical figures have the 'wrong' accent: The portrayal of Thomas Andrews by British actor Michael Goodlife was believable, but the accent should have been not British but Irish. Murdoch's accent should have been Scottish, and so on. [42] James Cameron's vision of the Titanic decided that the most compelling and lucrative story would focus on two young lovers who had just met. Looking at the passenger manifest, where survivors are listed in italics and the dead are not, suggests how blandly offensive this vision is. It's hard to argue with the chivalry of "women and children first," but for family after family, particularly among first class passengers, fathers and husbands went down with the ship while mothers, wives, and kiddies (and often the female servants of the very wealthy) rowed away in lifeboats. Arthur Ryerson, scion of the steel and iron family, took off his lifebelt when he saw that his wife's maid, Victorine, didn't have one. Ryerson, his wife, and three of their children were returning from France to the U.S. for the funeral of his son, who had been thrown from a car the week before. Ryerson Senior perished. John Jacob Astor asked if he could accompany his wife, who was pregnant, into a boat; request denied. She and her maid survived; Astor and his manservant died. A strange calm descended over the doomed elite: Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet changed into their evening clothes so they could "go down like gentlemen." Mrs. Isador Straus refused to leave her husband (the founder of Macy's) and they watched the hubbub, arms entwined, as in another part of the ship steerage passengers, many of whom didn't speak English, clutched rosaries and prayed. But character was not uniformly spread amongst the nobility. As the ship disappeared beneath the waves, Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon in Lifeboat 1 remarked to her secretary: "There is your beautiful nightdress gone." The book is filled with details I had never known. It seems that the tragedy might have been prevented if just one of several events had played out differently:

Cameron’s Titanic ruled cinemas in 1997-98, breaking records and hoarding awards and filling the airwaves with Celine Dion. This came as a surprise to a lot of folks, but not those who had already been on the bandwagon, who recognized that the sinking of the Titanic is a near-perfect story of an incredibly imperfect voyage. But it went beyond that. If this supreme achievement was so terribly fragile, what about everything else? If wealth meant so little on this cold April night, did it mean so much the rest of the year? Scores of ministers preached that the Titanic was a heaven-sent lesson to awaken people from their complacency, to punish them for a top-heavy faith in material progress. If it was a lesson, it worked — people have never been sure of anything since. A Night to Remember gives a gripping, detailed account of what happened the night the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic Ocean, killing more than 1,500 people. Originally published in 1955, Walter Lord had interviewed survivors and reviewed documents to create this incredible narrative of the events surrounding April 15, 1912. I also liked the context Lord gave to the tragedy: The world premiere was on Thursday, 3 July 1958, at the Odeon Leicester Square. Boxhall and Third Officer Herbert Pitman attended the premier along with survivor Walter Nichols. [22] Titanic survivor Elizabeth Dowdell attended the American premiere in New York on Tuesday 16 December 1958. [44] Reception [ edit ] Critical reception [ edit ] Enjoyed this greatly. I especially enjoyed Lord's analysis of the class snobbery and attitudes of the time that led to a higher percentage of deaths among the third-class passengers vs. the first and second classes, and the media's disinterest at the time to hearing the stories of the common people in preference to the Astors and the other robber-baron types. On the other hand, he is fair, and gives credit to almost everyone for having class and dignity. I hesitate to call Lord's treatment of the issues "socially conscious," I just think he was trying to be more "fair and balanced" as a historian than other writers had been previously.Sragow, Michael (26 March 2012). "Nearer, My Titanic to Thee". The Criterion Collection . Retrieved 27 April 2012.