Alicia I love this movie so much

SoTrumpBelieve Must See Movie...

GazerRise Fantastic!

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

utgard14 Fine telling of the story of the doomed ocean liner, focused on one family in particular on board. Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb play an unhappily married couple. He's a rich snob and she doesn't want her kids to grow up spoiled. So she boards the Titanic with them bound for America, where she boasts they will walk to school. The couple's differences seem irreconcilable, especially after one painful revelation. Then, of course, the ship sinks. Hope that's not a spoiler!Despite some unlikely casting, Stanwyck and Webb do a good job of selling themselves as a married couple. Their final scene together is especially well-done. Big kudos to Webb for one of his best dramatic screen performances here. Brian Aherne plays the ship's captain. Robert Wagner appears in an early role. Having met on this movie, he and Stanwyck would have a four-year relationship, despite the huge age difference. Richard Basehart, Thelma Ritter, and Allyn Joslyn are solid in small supporting roles. Obviously not the Titanic most people are familiar with today but very good and worth checking out. Unless you're an iceberg, the ending will have you in tears.

Lechuguilla One of the most fateful and foreboding stories ever committed to film, this version is by far the best cinematic treatment of the epic ocean disaster of 1912. A fictional but plausible story of the breakup of a marriage and the effects on a wealthy family overlay the real-life cataclysmic end to the unsinkable boat, the largest moving object ever built at the time. This blatant irony is unnerving.The fictional story is well written with good plot flow and transitions. Characters are well defined and interesting. What I like here is the contrast between the personal pettiness of Julia (Barbara Stanwyck) and Richard (Clifton Webb), against the ominous and overarching doom toward which they are unknowingly moving.Similarly, Captain Smith (Brian Aherne) goes about his ship duties in a most nonchalant manner, just one more voyage among countless others. Arguably, the ship itself is the main character, majestic, stately, grand, and luxurious, matching its first-class passengers, the focus of this story.The script is terrific but the production may be even better. Production design and costumes are detailed and seem authentic for that era. Photographic effects of the ship sinking, combined with that mournful wailing sound, magnify the drama. Absence of score enhances realism, and songs are appropriately melancholy. Casting and acting range from acceptable to great; Thelma Ritter gives an unusually good performance.Some Titanic films convey a semi-documentary look and feel; characters in these films are mere props, lacking humanity. By contrast, "Titanic" (1953) has heart and soul. After all, the epic event was first and foremost a story about people, individuals with personal problems and dreams for the future. That's what makes this film so emotionally rich.With its poetic script and terrific execution, "Titanic" (1953) gives us a timeless story of ominous fate, a poignant humanistic story of misplaced trust in technology, and the dramatic contrast between short-term pettiness and misfortune so dire as to overwhelm those affected for the rest of their lives.

jc-osms I've seen most of the dramatisations of the tragic maiden voyage of the Titanic including the recent 100th anniversary TV production but found this version of events the most satisfying and moving. Of course the whole point about any "Titanic" film is how to fill the space until the iceberg hits, which naturally means concocting fictional dramas amongst the passengers and on this occasion, slightly melodramatic as they were (an alcoholic priest, a tug-of-love between an American townie and her high-falutin' husband...), with sympathetic writing and strong playing, they certainly engaged my interest and by the bitter end, emotions too.Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck make an unlikely couple at first, but one comes to believe in their story, especially after Stanwyck makes her shock revelation to Webb as she desperately tries to maintain the loyalty of their two young children against the high-life allure of Webb's nomadic lifestyle. Their last scenes in particular have a rare poignancy as Webb at last shows the sacrifice and devotion that as both a father and husband he's sorely lacked before.In the lesser tales, we get to see Richard Basehart deliver a good performance as a fallen priest, who again rediscovers his vocation at the hour of greatest need and a young lantern-jawed Robert Wagner as the freshman suitor of Webb and Stanwyck's somewhat stuffy daughter. A singer and dancer he isn't though!While the special effects of the day are naturally and obviously based on a ship's model, these aren't too distracting. Occasionally you feel there aren't that many people on the boat itself and it's noticeable that there's very little coverage of the below-deck drama as the ship fills up with water, but the final scenes, especially the largely non-judgemental treatment of the captain and crew, seemed about right to me; there's no doubting the valour and devotion to duty of this particular captain in going down with his ship unlike a certain Italian captain in the modern disaster of the Concordia.This feature succeeds therefore in the quality of its writing (which was Oscar-nominated) and sensitive direction and acting rather than the special effects, which surely is as it should be.

James Hitchcock There have been many films and TV dramas about the sinking of the RMS Titanic, a story which ever since 1912 has gripped the human imagination, far more than other, similar, maritime disasters. (I cannot, for example, think of a single film about the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915, even though it caused nearly as many deaths). There are several reasons for this, primarily that the Titanic can be seen to symbolise the vanity of human wishes, the inadequacy of human technology and human powerlessness against a hostile Nature. (The Lusitania was sunk as a deliberate act of war, so its loss carries no such symbolic meaning). As Thomas Hardy wrote in "Convergence of the Twain", his poem on the disaster:-"In a solitude of the seaDeep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she". This American film was one of two versions from the 1950s, the other being the British-made "A Night to Remember". There was also a notorious Nazi propaganda version (which I have never seen) but the one everyone knows today is James Cameron's from 1997. Jean Negulesco's "Titanic" from 1953, however, has one advantage over Cameron's grand epic- a better human interest story. Whereas Cameron just had that clichéd love-story of Kate and Leo, Negulesco's film has a plot which could almost be something out of Henry James. (It won the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay, although it was fortunate in that many of the "big films" of 1953, such as "From Here to Eternity", "Julius Caesar" and "Shane", were adaptations from other media and hence not eligible for that award). The film centres upon a wealthy estranged couple, Richard and Julia Sturges. Julia is from Mackinac, Michigan. (I understand that the name of the town is correctly pronounced "Mackinaw", but in the film it is always pronounced as it is spelled). Richard's nationality is something of an enigma. He is played by an American actor, Clifton Webb, but speaks with a British accent. There are, however, hints that he is not an Englishman but a Europeanised American, possibly an East Coast blue blood, who has fallen in love with European "high society". This has caused his estrangement from his wife, who regards this world as snobbish and artificial, and has booked a passage to America on the Titanic with her children Annette and Norman. Julia has kept her plans a secret from Richard, but he has somehow found out about them and, determined to persuade the children to return to Europe with him, buys a ticket from a Basque immigrant. (Despite his only holding a steerage ticket, nobody attempts to prevent Richard from using the first-class facilities). Julia privately despairs of being able to influence the seventeen-year-old Annette, whom she regards as being as great a snob as her father, but hopes to rescue young Norman from European decadence. On the voyage, however, Annette falls in love with Gifford Rogers, a young college student who, although wealthy, is exactly the sort of non-decadent sun-tanned, crew-cut, All-American male whom Julia would want as a son-in-law. There is also a sub-plot about George Healey, a Catholic priest defrocked for alcoholism. I found the story of the Sturges family so entertaining that I wished that these characters had been created in the context of some other film where they could have worked out their own solution to their problems rather than having a solution forced upon them by the iceberg. I never felt like that about Jack and Rose. In other respects, however, Cameron's film is superior. It is obviously superior in terms of its visual effects, but it might be unfair to make comparisons in this respect; the makers of the earlier film did not have either the modern special effects technology or the budget (even allowing for inflation) that were available to Cameron.The other respect in which I feel the newer film is better is in the way in which it portrays human reactions to the disaster. Although the older film was made four decades after the loss of the Titanic, it suggests that in some respects social attitudes had not changed very much between 1912 and 1953, certainly much less than they were to change in the next four decades between the 1950s and the 1990s. If the film-makers of the 1910s had had the benefits of more modern technology, including talking pictures, and if they had decided to make a movie about the sinking shortly after it took place, I doubt if the resulting film would have been very different to Negulesco's.The prevailing atmosphere after the iceberg strikes is one of Edwardian stiff-upper-lip heroism, with all the adult males (bar a single coward who disguises himself as a woman) unquestioningly following the "women and children first" policy, helping their wives, sweethearts and children into the few lifeboats then stoically standing on the decks to await their inevitable deaths while singing hymns. The ship's captain, Edward Smith, portrayed in the 1997 film as a weak character unable to stand up to the bullying ship-owner J. Bruce Ismay, here becomes a gallant hero whose decisive leadership and self-sacrifice saves the lives of many others. Cameron's film, by contrast, does show some acts of heroism, but also shows that not everyone was a hero and that chaos and panic were more common reactions. That film may have been unfair to certain individuals, particularly in its calumny of the ship's First Officer William Murdoch, but overall I felt that its picture of the disaster was not only more accurate but also more moving, presenting it is the tragic waste of life it really was rather than sentimentalising it as some sort of noble and heroic martyrdom. Not every remake is inferior to its original. 6/10