Titanic '53 1953, Rated NR Clifton Webb

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Starring 20th Century Fox.

Released in 1953, this version of the Titanic disaster has a running time of just over 97 minutes. I was shocked while watching this film to find that the ocean liner doesn't hit the iceberg until 70 odd minutes in. I found this quite troubling. Why on earth would anyone make a movie about the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic, and spend roughly 80% of the films screen-time focusing on the mundane events occurring on board like card games, shuffleboard tournaments, and a Purdue tennis player's attempts to pick up a French society girl? Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb's tale of differing opinions on how to raise their two teenage children is at the center of this films plot, but Negulesco doesn't follow this story with any sense of rhythm, fervor, or energy. As Negulesco's Titanic opened, the viewer was told that the events of the film to proceed were all truthful, and were based off the survivors accounts of the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, and the senate committees investigation of the accident. However, when all was said and done, the events that transpired in this film seemed quite unrealistic. Based on the screenplay of this film, this is what I took with me as having happened after the Titanic struck the iceberg:

The huffy, British society types on board stopped playing their bridge games to calmly listen to what the members of the crew were telling them. Responding to the news that their ship was sinking, everyone quietly put on their life-jackets, with the women and children carefully being escorted to their pre-assigned seats in their pre-assigned lifeboats. The men on deck remained peaceful and talked wistfully about the good times that they had shared while smoking cigarettes. Soon, the people left on board began to sing a hymn, as lead by a disavowed preacher, at which time the Titanic decided to completely submerged itself in less than 1.76 seconds.

Call me overly suspicious, but that's not the way I see it as having happened. There was no mention of any pushing, desperate attempts to swim to the half-filled lifeboats, or men falling 500 feet through the air and hitting their heads on propeller blades and the like. Also quite peculiar to this retelling of the Titanic disaster was the fact that screenwriters Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard L. Breen, curiously made no mention of the real life characters of Thomas Andrews, the master shipbuilder who designed the Titanic, J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of White Star Lines, and the 'unsinkable' Molly Brown, all of whom were on board, and played fairly large roles in the other Titanic films. The sets of Negulesco's Titanic are visibly wooden, literally, and the script too meandering to deliver even the slightest thrills, or chills about the Titanic's unfortunate sinking. A Night To Remember, made just five year senior to Negulesco's Titanic, was an infinitely better film, and one that didn't attempt to justify the trials and tribulations of parenting teenagers.