“World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg,” read the The Onion headline. Agreed. As Kate Winslet’s own Freud-referencing Rose Dewitt Bukater snips, James Cameron’s Titanic is epic cinema’s grandest erection, and when the near-scale model set of the towering hulk of steel that was, at the time, the largest ship in the world severs down the middle, it then becomes the most vulgar representation of castration to ever cause millions of heartwarmed teenage girls to choke sobs into their fists. It’s a ready-made sarcophagus for everything that’s vulgar in mainstream cinema. Titanic both embodies and validates the excess that is its own subject.
And Titanic is arguably the most artlessly touching disaster movie of all. No, really. Time and a number of equally irony-free blockbusters in the interim (including Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings...
And Titanic is arguably the most artlessly touching disaster movie of all. No, really. Time and a number of equally irony-free blockbusters in the interim (including Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings...
- 11/29/2023
- by Eric Henderson
- Slant Magazine
This meticulous docu-drama is still the best show about the Titanic, the awesome disaster that has never lost its grip on the imagination. Roy Ward Baker leads an enormous cast of Brit character actors through 2.5 hours of true-life terror in the icy Atlantic — Kenneth More, Honor Blackman, David McCallum, Laurence Naismith, Anthony Bushell. No stupid subplots and no insulting anachronisms, just an awful sinking death trap and 1600 passengers facing the freezing water. [Imprint] brings some new extras to the mix, too.
A Night to Remember
Blu-ray
Viavision [Imprint] #135
1958 / B&w / 1:66 enhanced widescreen / 123 min. / Street Date June 29, 2022 / Available from / 39.95
Starring: Kenneth More, Honor Blackman, David McCallum, Laurence Naismith, Anthony Bushell, Alec McCowen, John Cairney, Michael Goodliffe, Ronald Allen, John Merivale, Jill Dixon, Kenneth Griffith, Frank Lawton, Tucker McGuire, Ralph Michael, George Rose, Joseph Tomelty, Jack Watling, Michael Bryant, Bee Duffel, Thomas Heathcote, Andrew Keir, Jeremy Bulloch, Desmond Llewelyn, Derren Nesbitt, Beth Rogan,...
A Night to Remember
Blu-ray
Viavision [Imprint] #135
1958 / B&w / 1:66 enhanced widescreen / 123 min. / Street Date June 29, 2022 / Available from / 39.95
Starring: Kenneth More, Honor Blackman, David McCallum, Laurence Naismith, Anthony Bushell, Alec McCowen, John Cairney, Michael Goodliffe, Ronald Allen, John Merivale, Jill Dixon, Kenneth Griffith, Frank Lawton, Tucker McGuire, Ralph Michael, George Rose, Joseph Tomelty, Jack Watling, Michael Bryant, Bee Duffel, Thomas Heathcote, Andrew Keir, Jeremy Bulloch, Desmond Llewelyn, Derren Nesbitt, Beth Rogan,...
- 7/12/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This December will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.
To sign up for a free two-week trial here.
Friday, December 1
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World*: Criterion Collection Edition #692
Stanley Kramer followed his harrowing Oscar winner Judgment at Nuremberg with the most grandly harebrained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick and borscht-belt-y one-liners about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure. Performed by a nonpareil cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery. Supplemental Features: an audio commentary featuring It’s a Mad,...
To sign up for a free two-week trial here.
Friday, December 1
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World*: Criterion Collection Edition #692
Stanley Kramer followed his harrowing Oscar winner Judgment at Nuremberg with the most grandly harebrained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick and borscht-belt-y one-liners about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure. Performed by a nonpareil cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery. Supplemental Features: an audio commentary featuring It’s a Mad,...
- 11/30/2017
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
The sinking of the Titanic is a event that, with its horrific, escalating sequence of mistakes and massive loss of life, has captured the imagination of pretty much everyone who’s lived in the 101 years since it sank. Dramatisations, on the large and small screen, have played a big part in this, turning the tragedy into an emotionally unifying melodrama, without losing any of the tragic effect. Obviously James Cameron’s epic (and in many ways definitive) film version that swept the Oscars and the box office played a big part in that, but even before then, particularly in the decades directly following the disaster, there’s been a multitude of movies that have looked at Titanic in one way or another.
And why not? With the obvious class divide, present in both the ship’s design and pushed to the fore in its sinking, and Titanic herself serving as...
And why not? With the obvious class divide, present in both the ship’s design and pushed to the fore in its sinking, and Titanic herself serving as...
- 11/20/2013
- by Alex Leadbeater
- Obsessed with Film
The gray rolling seas thundered through the forest of pilings under the piers, sometimes cresting enough to send a geyser of wind-whipped froth up onto the decking. Other places, it poured through the gaps the wind and tide had eaten through the dunes and poured into the beach town streets. It pulled boats large and small from their moorings in the lagoon marinas and piled them like a child’s toys up on the land. Some in apartment buildings would tell of the cars in the ground level garage floating against each other bathtub playthings. But there was nothing childlike in the way it took entire houses, made seaside villages look like an extension of the ocean and not the land.
For the day and a half I watched Hurricane Sandy pound my home state of New Jersey – which was all the time I had before I lost my cable...
For the day and a half I watched Hurricane Sandy pound my home state of New Jersey – which was all the time I had before I lost my cable...
- 11/2/2012
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
Titanic movies probably reveal more about the times they were made than the year the boat sank. In the 1933 movie of Coward's Cavalcade, it's a numinous moment in the years leading up to the great war and the depression. The 1943 German Titanic, a special project of Josef Goebbels, is anti-British propaganda on an epic scale, attacking corrupt British capitalism and celebrating German heroism. The 1953 Hollywood film Titanic endorses American family values of the Eisenhower era, and the 1958 A Night to Remember (based on Walter Lord's excellent book) scrupulously dramatises the events, underlining British sang-froid and noting the useful legislation it promoted. Cameron's 1997 picture sets off the American spirit of love, youth, equality and scepticism against British snobbery, complacency and crippling attachment to tradition which have had a baleful effect on the United States.
Cameron's plot differs little from Road to Rio (or A Night at the Opera), except that...
Cameron's plot differs little from Road to Rio (or A Night at the Opera), except that...
- 4/14/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
A scene from James Cameron’s “Titanic” (1997)
Will the 100th anniversary sink the unsinkable story?
“Publishers always underestimate the Titanic,” Walter Lord said with a smile as we sat in his memorabilia-filled Manhattan apartment on an autumn day in 1986. I was meeting with the celebrated author of “A Night to Remember” to discuss an introduction for Robert Ballard’s book about his exploration of the Titanic wreck. There had been some resistance to the book from publishers at the Frankfurt...
Will the 100th anniversary sink the unsinkable story?
“Publishers always underestimate the Titanic,” Walter Lord said with a smile as we sat in his memorabilia-filled Manhattan apartment on an autumn day in 1986. I was meeting with the celebrated author of “A Night to Remember” to discuss an introduction for Robert Ballard’s book about his exploration of the Titanic wreck. There had been some resistance to the book from publishers at the Frankfurt...
- 4/12/2012
- by Hugh Brewster
- Speakeasy/Wall Street Journal
"It may not be true that 'the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,' as one historian has put it, but it's not much of an exaggeration," writes Daniel Mendelsohn in this week's New Yorker. "Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard, twenty-nine boilers, a jeweled copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn't stopped."
What follows is an epic and irresistibly readable survey of 100 years' worth of Titanic lore. The disaster immediately inspired a "glut" of poems, "more than a hundred songs," countless histories, novels and plays and, of course, innumerable films, both narrative and documentary:
A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie...
What follows is an epic and irresistibly readable survey of 100 years' worth of Titanic lore. The disaster immediately inspired a "glut" of poems, "more than a hundred songs," countless histories, novels and plays and, of course, innumerable films, both narrative and documentary:
A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie...
- 4/10/2012
- MUBI
There's a foretaste of the Somme and a whole social order being upended in Roy Ward Baker's film
Ah, the many Proustian pleasures to be derived from a renewed acquaintance with Roy Ward Baker's 1958 Titanic melodrama A Night To Remember ... Last seen by me on some wintry Sunday afternoon in the prepubescent early 1970s, probably in the same post-prandial time-slot where I first encountered The Cockleshell Heroes, Carve Her Name With Pride and The Colditz Story – the dull roar of British postwar self-congratulation on film. It has lingered clearly in my head in a way none of those others ever did, and come back fresh as ever.
Certain pleasures derive from familiarity: any waterborne or storm-tossed movie made in Britain in those years fetched up sooner or later in what I've always thought of as "the Ealing tank", although here it's the equally ripple-free Pinewood tank, abetted, pricelessly,...
Ah, the many Proustian pleasures to be derived from a renewed acquaintance with Roy Ward Baker's 1958 Titanic melodrama A Night To Remember ... Last seen by me on some wintry Sunday afternoon in the prepubescent early 1970s, probably in the same post-prandial time-slot where I first encountered The Cockleshell Heroes, Carve Her Name With Pride and The Colditz Story – the dull roar of British postwar self-congratulation on film. It has lingered clearly in my head in a way none of those others ever did, and come back fresh as ever.
Certain pleasures derive from familiarity: any waterborne or storm-tossed movie made in Britain in those years fetched up sooner or later in what I've always thought of as "the Ealing tank", although here it's the equally ripple-free Pinewood tank, abetted, pricelessly,...
- 4/6/2012
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
Latest Additions Include Star-Studded Appearances, Noted Film Historians,
An Opening-Night Poolside Screening of High Society (1956)
And a Vanity Fair Showcase of Architecture in Film
Complete Schedule for 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival
Now Available at http://www.tcm.com/festival
With just over two weeks left before opening day, the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival continues to expand its already-packed slate with new events and live appearances:
On opening night of the festival, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel will be the site of a poolside screening of the lavish Cole Porter musical High Society (1956), starring Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Actresses Maud Adams and Eunice Gayson will attend a 50th Anniversary screening of the James Bond classic Dr. No (1962) and participate in a conversation about being “Bond Girls.” Filmmaker Mel Brooks will be on hand to introduce his brilliant parody Young Frankenstein (1974). Filmmaker John Carpenter will introduce his favorite film, the...
An Opening-Night Poolside Screening of High Society (1956)
And a Vanity Fair Showcase of Architecture in Film
Complete Schedule for 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival
Now Available at http://www.tcm.com/festival
With just over two weeks left before opening day, the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival continues to expand its already-packed slate with new events and live appearances:
On opening night of the festival, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel will be the site of a poolside screening of the lavish Cole Porter musical High Society (1956), starring Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Actresses Maud Adams and Eunice Gayson will attend a 50th Anniversary screening of the James Bond classic Dr. No (1962) and participate in a conversation about being “Bond Girls.” Filmmaker Mel Brooks will be on hand to introduce his brilliant parody Young Frankenstein (1974). Filmmaker John Carpenter will introduce his favorite film, the...
- 3/28/2012
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
With James Cameron’s Titanic sailing back into cinemas towing an extra dimension author David Kowalski gives his thought on the hold Titanic has in popular culture, with particular reference to the depictions of the disaster in movies and in fiction.
You can visit David’s website here for details on his work and inspirations and there’s a link to find out more about his book at the end of this post.
The earliest recollection I have of the Titanic in fiction was Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic.
The title alone was enough to excite me. It’s one of the early Dirk Pitt novels and a lot of fun. I remember seeing the film, and dated as it seems by today’s standards, there is something stirring about seeing the ship rising from the depths.
A Night to Remember is probably my favorite retelling of the story.
You can visit David’s website here for details on his work and inspirations and there’s a link to find out more about his book at the end of this post.
The earliest recollection I have of the Titanic in fiction was Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic.
The title alone was enough to excite me. It’s one of the early Dirk Pitt novels and a lot of fun. I remember seeing the film, and dated as it seems by today’s standards, there is something stirring about seeing the ship rising from the depths.
A Night to Remember is probably my favorite retelling of the story.
- 3/26/2012
- by Guest
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
The 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival has unveiled another spectacular lineup of special guests and events for this year’s four-day gathering in Hollywood. Among the newly announced participants for this year’s festival are five-time Emmy® winner Dick Van Dyke, Oscar® winner Shirley Jones, two-time Golden Globe® winner Angie Dickinson, six-time Golden Globe nominee Robert Wagner, seven-time Oscar nominee Norman Jewison, longtime producer A.C. Lyles and three-time Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker. In addition, the festival will feature a special three-film tribute to director/choreographer Stanley Donen, who will be on-hand for the celebration.
As part of its overall Style and the Movies theme, the festival has added several films featuring the work of pioneering costume designer Travis Banton. Oscar-nominated costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis will introduce the six-movie slate, with actress and former Essentials co-host Rose McGowan joining her for one of the screenings.
Other festival additions include a screening...
As part of its overall Style and the Movies theme, the festival has added several films featuring the work of pioneering costume designer Travis Banton. Oscar-nominated costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis will introduce the six-movie slate, with actress and former Essentials co-host Rose McGowan joining her for one of the screenings.
Other festival additions include a screening...
- 3/9/2012
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: March 27, 2012
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
British director Roy Ward’s unforgettable rendering of Walter Lord’s book A Night to Remember is arguably the finest dramatization of the sinking of the great ship ‘Titanic’ ever put on film. Yes, there are even many who feel that it’s more effective and memorable than James Cameron’s Titanic from 1997.
Starring such familiar British actors as Kenneth More, Ronald Allen, Robert Ayres and Honor Blackman, the classic 1958 action-drama A Night to Remember offers a sensitive and subtle but nonetheless grand depiction of the ship’s final hours.
Criterion released a DVD edition of A Night to Remember back in 1998. This latest DVD version, released alongside the film’s Blu-ray debut to acknowledge the 100-year memorial of the sinking , will include a bunch of bonus features not seen on the original DVD.
Here’s a list of features...
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion
British director Roy Ward’s unforgettable rendering of Walter Lord’s book A Night to Remember is arguably the finest dramatization of the sinking of the great ship ‘Titanic’ ever put on film. Yes, there are even many who feel that it’s more effective and memorable than James Cameron’s Titanic from 1997.
Starring such familiar British actors as Kenneth More, Ronald Allen, Robert Ayres and Honor Blackman, the classic 1958 action-drama A Night to Remember offers a sensitive and subtle but nonetheless grand depiction of the ship’s final hours.
Criterion released a DVD edition of A Night to Remember back in 1998. This latest DVD version, released alongside the film’s Blu-ray debut to acknowledge the 100-year memorial of the sinking , will include a bunch of bonus features not seen on the original DVD.
Here’s a list of features...
- 12/27/2011
- by Laurence
- Disc Dish
Film director whose quirky career covered sci-fi, westerns, drama and Hammer horror
Roy Ward Baker, who has died aged 93, progressed from teaboy to director of sturdy British dramas to weird Hammer horrors, via Hollywood. It was a rather quirky career for a very straightforward man. Baker – who directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock and made the camp Mexican western The Singer Not the Song, the lesbian The Vampire Lovers and the transsexual Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde – insisted on calling himself "a simple-minded English lad". Perhaps the film closest to his personality was A Night to Remember (1958), which many would argue is the best of the cinematic versions of the story of the sinking of the Titanic.
Roy Horace Baker (he frequently replaced his middle name with Ward, his mother's maiden name) was born in London into a middle-class family. As a boy, he was sent to study...
Roy Ward Baker, who has died aged 93, progressed from teaboy to director of sturdy British dramas to weird Hammer horrors, via Hollywood. It was a rather quirky career for a very straightforward man. Baker – who directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock and made the camp Mexican western The Singer Not the Song, the lesbian The Vampire Lovers and the transsexual Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde – insisted on calling himself "a simple-minded English lad". Perhaps the film closest to his personality was A Night to Remember (1958), which many would argue is the best of the cinematic versions of the story of the sinking of the Titanic.
Roy Horace Baker (he frequently replaced his middle name with Ward, his mother's maiden name) was born in London into a middle-class family. As a boy, he was sent to study...
- 10/8/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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