TITANIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 740, 18 September 1953, Page 15

TITANIC

(20th Century-Fox) HE sinking of the luxury liner R.M.S. Titanic on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912, with the loss of 1513 lives, was one of the greatest modern disasters of the sea. This film version handles the affair with the strictest attention to the historical facts, but it is concerned less with trying to dramatise the tragedy than with using it as a background to a slick story about the marital problems of two of the passengers -a wealthy dandy played with his usual waspish certainty by Clifton Webb, and his selfpitying wife (Barbara Stanwyck). Among the other passengers involved are a drunken, unfrocked priest returning home in disgrace from Rome, portrayed by Richard Basehart, a rich widow (Thelma Ritter), the dandy’s daughter (Audrey Dalton), and her boy friend (Robert Wagner). The role of the Titanic’s bearded captain is taken by Brian Aherne. The dramatic opening shot of Titanic, showing an iceberg breaking off the end of a glacier with a terrifying rumble, suggests that the film will contain some good photography of Atlantic stofms and the struggle of men against the sea. But nothing like this develops. The best se- quence, showing the actual sinking after the liner strikes an iceberg in the middle of a calm, cold night, with the sea like a mill-pond, is well. contrived. The camera cuts from shots of the passengers making their way to the lifeboats to the scene on the bridge where the captain realises there aren’t enough lifeboats to go round, to the coal-blackened stokers shovelling to the end in a vast stokehold. Yet despite all the skill of the director, Jean Negulesco, there is something unreal and artificia] about even this key sequence, é One of the main criticisms to be made of Titanic is that the action drags along at a snail-like speed. This may have been done deliberately to suggest the spacious, leisurely life on board of the Astors and Guggenheims and other

diamond-studded aristocrats of the First Class, where the story is concentrated. But the real story of the Titanic is scarcely dealt with. A few scenes are cut in of the chart-room, where iceberg reports received earlier in the voyage are plotted, or of the captain being suavely reminded by an agent of the. company at Cherbourg that the ship is expected to make a record run on its maiden voyage. But the true salt of the drama is glossed over by the producer and script-writer, Charles Brackett, in favour of an empty domestic squabble which would have looked just as pointless on dry land. The authenticity of the atmosphere of a British Atlantic liner is strictly maintained down to .the last accent of the cabin stewards. A former captain of the Queen Elizabeth is said to have been employed by the film’s makers for exactly that purpose. But the four-fun-nelled model which is used to represent the Titanic, in long shot, as she ploughs her way through a glassy ocean, is very clearly nothing but a model.