After he read the exciting and meticulously researched book of that name by the American Walter Lord (a lowly writer in a Madison Avenue advertising firm by day), he was determined that it would get the film treatment. But the studio executive at the Rank Organization said: “Bill, this is just another shipwreck movie. It’s been made before.” (Indeed, there was a 1953 Hollywood movie called “Titanic.”) MacQuittey recalled his reply in a 1993 interview: “This is an end of an era. The steerage passengers paid £12 and the stateroom passengers paid £875 for a five-day trip.”
There weren’t enough lifeboats for steerage passengers, he added, and yet the first-class passengers were lowered in their best evening clothes. For MacQuitty, it was a story about arrogance.
As proof that the world truly did change in the years after 1912, he said that the Belfast Titanic commemoration listed people in order of importance whereas the 1914-18 war memorial had the dead in simple alphabetical order.
The movie’s main star was the sympathetic Kenneth More as 2nd Officer Charles Lightholler. His name was twice the size of the next 25 actors in the opening credits, which in turn were twice the size of the third batch, in cinematic steerage as it were. In the second group were those playing the Titanic’s radio operators – David McCallum, still going strong in the CBS series “NCIS,” and the late Kenneth Griffith, who made the banned documentary about Michael Collins in the 1970s.
When “A Night to Remember” was made, the tragedy of April 14-15, 1912, was still fresh in the memory of some (the equivalent now would be a film about an event in 1966). The 4th Officer Joseph Boxhall was the technical advisor, and Lightholler’s widow visited the set. Survivor Elizabeth Dowdell attended the U.S. premiere of the British film in New York in December 1958.
There were enough lifeboats for about half the people on board, yet two out of every three – more than 1,500 – perished. MacQuitty said: “’Women and children first’ was interpreted inaccurately by Lightholler as ‘only women and children.’”
Consider the figures for the 2nd class passengers: all of the children (there were 24) and 86 percent of the women survived, whereas 92 percent of the men died. In 3rd class: 46 percent of the women made it to New York, together with 34 percent of the children and 16 percent of the men. In first class, 83.4 percent of the children (5 of 6) and 97 percent of the women made it out alive, while only 33 percent of the men did. As for the crew, 78 percent of the men and 13 percent of the women died.
After the Titanic left Liverpool, it stopped off at Southampton, then Cherbourg and finally Queenstown (now Cobh), where many Irish immigrants got on, and among them, for the movie’s purposes, a plucky group that best represents the film’s democratic spirit.
“You’ll all come back when your fortunes are made,” says the parish priest as they leave their home village. “We will that, Father,” one of the men replies.
MacQuitty said in 1993 that the film hadn’t dated because it was the truth (he used the Titanic’s blueprints, for example, in his quest for authenticity), but “A Night to Remember” is also a magnificent piece of storytelling.
