A Night to Remember: The Classic Bestselling Account of the Sinking of the Titanic

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According to Professor Paul Heyer, the film helped to spark the wave of disaster films that included The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Hearing him, Captain Smith turned to Quartermaster Rowe—still fiddling with the Morse lamp—and told him to take charge. The narrative builds suspense, making the reader care about the characters and revisit the disaster from their perspective. When questioned as to why he did this, Roy Baker noted that "it was a British film made by British artists for a British audience".

The fictional Yates says, "Good luck and God bless you", the words spoken by an unknown swimmer at Collapsible B, who survivor fireman Walter Hurst thought was Captain Smith. Lord was something of a harmless crank with a bit of a fascination with this big honkin' ship that had run into an iceberg a few decades before. And later, of the chaos and panic when it is clear she will go down, and there are not enough lifeboats for everyone aboard to safely get away. The Carpathia arrives to rescue the survivors, as a shaken Lightoller tells Colonel Archibald Gracie, "I don't think I'll ever feel sure again, about anything.

For some reason, I've never found the time to watch it, even though I own it (*see 2016 addendum, bottom of review). Walter Lord's classic bestselling history of the voyage, the wreck and the aftermath is a tour de force of detailed investigation and the upstairs/downstairs divide. Lord tells the Titanic story the way I hope it happened, and the way that the survivors remembered it. I believe it was in the 1980s; I know it was long before the hugely successful movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. The special effects were so good that the ship sinking model shots were re-used in the 1958 Brit version, based on this book: "A Night to Remember.

First published in 1955, A Night to Remember remains a completely riveting account of the Titanic's fatal collision and the behavior of the passengers and crew, both noble and ignominious. Some of this was down to the Society women who urged the lifeboats away so that they wouldn't be overcome by desperate survivors - but that seamen should subscribe to this seems extraordinary. This being the 1950s, he then topped that off by interviewing many of the survivors of that disaster.When he describes the ship's break-up, he does so by listing and contrasting all the different items breaking loose and crashing together, from the 29 boilers to a jeweled copy of the Rubaiyat, from 30,000 eggs to “a little mantel clock in B-38. Margaret 'Molly' Brown: He built me a house and he had silver dollars cemented all over the floors of every room! adjusted for inflation [2019]) was exceptional and made it the most expensive film ever made in Britain up to that time. Also, the film diverges from both the book and the NBC TV adaptation in focusing on a central character, Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who does and says some things that other crewmembers are reported to have done and said during the actual disaster. Andrew Collins of Empire gave the film five out of five stars, writing that "this is a landmark in British cinema, as good today as it's always been".

He also includes interesting commentary on the contemporary newspaper accounts, many of which were racist attributing cowardly acts to blacks and Italians that were actually committed by Anglo-Saxons. This connection to White Star, according to MacQuitty, is what actually led the Shaw Savill Line to pull out of the film. 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. Walter Lord tells the story of one of the most famous ocean disasters from before the ship struck an iceberg to the aftermath of the sinking.Roy Ward Baker thought they added a huge amount of realism, as they sounded like the groaning noises a sinking ship would make, so he kept them in. The Ladies' Home Journal and Reader's Digest both published condensed versions and it was selected in June 1956 by the Book of the Month Club.

Brian Lavery is Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and author of over 30 books on ships and seafaring.

I was struck by the appalling level of class favoritism when it came time for Titanic’s compliment of 2,229 to abandon ship.