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The Worst Film Ever

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Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

A couple of melodramatic stories that go nowhere are used to anchor this film whose sole reason for existence is (or was) to show audiences at the time what the sinking of the famously doomed ocean liner probably looked like. The exact same description could be used for the 1997 phenom directed by James Cameron, except that advanced technology allowed that film to fill out the destruction of the ship to epic proportions. As a result, there's really no reason to watch this 1953 version, unless you just want something that's a lot shorter. I would normally say actresses like Barbara Stanwyck and Thelma Ritter are reason enough, but their talents are wasted on this ridiculously thin screenplay, which inexplicably won writers Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen an Oscar in 1953."Titanic" was also nominated for its black and white art direction, and it's kind of interesting to see how similar the recreation of the ship's interior is to the 1997 version (the answer is....pretty similar).Grade: C

This movie essentially begins with an American woman named "Julia Sturges" (Barbara Stanwyck) boarding the RMS Titanic with her 18 year-old daughter "Annette Sturges" (Audrey Dalton) and somewhat younger son "Norman Sturges" (Harper Carter). What neither Annette nor Norman realize is that Julia has booked passage on this particular ship to get away from her husband "Richard Ward Sturges" (Clifton Webb) in order to give them a chance to experience a normal life in the United States. Unfortunately, Richard finds out and manages to obtain a ticket at the last possible moment. Although an ugly argument ensues it is nothing in comparison to the disaster that awaits them in the near future. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a splendid film which manages to combine romance, drama and tragedy in an excellent manner. The fact that it won an Academy Award for "Best Writing, Story and Screenplay" attests to this. In any case, I highly recommend this film for those who might be interested in a movie of this type and I have rated it accordingly. Definitely above average.

One of the three big Titanic films made over the years, alongside A NIGHT TO REMEMBER and James Cameron's TITANIC. TITANIC (1953) loses points for being more than a little dated. Instead of focusing on the nitty-gritty details of the famous disaster, for much of the running time TITANIC is content to offer turgid melodrama and worst of all, romance. It's hardly gripping stuff.The viewer is required to wait a full two thirds of the running time before we get on with the disaster itself. When it finally takes place, it's admittedly exciting, shocking, and moving as you could hope for, but it's that first hour which really tests the patience. The likes of Clifton Webb, Barbara Stanwyck, and Robert Wagner are fine actors, but you're not watching to see the husband and wife bickering or to watch the young guy fall in love. You're here for the disaster, and everything else feels like a distraction. This is why A NIGHT TO REMEMBER remains my all-time favourite retelling of the Titanic story.

Knowing that the definitive cinematic depiction of the tragic events – Roy Ward Baker's A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1958) – was only a few years away, always seemed to me an indication that this major Hollywood studio version was a redundant production. It has been shown a few times on Italian TV over the years but I never bothered with it, and I had even recorded it on VHS off a Saturday night local TV screening; seeing it being given the prestigious "Fox Studio Classics" treatment on DVD made me prick up my ears somewhat (though still not enough for me to purchase a copy!) but, chancing upon it as a DVD rental, I eventually relented. Still, it has taken this month-long Oscar marathon to arrive at an actual viewing; incidentally, this is now the fifth screen retelling of the historical nautical disaster that I have gotten under my belt: apart from the aforementioned British classic, there were the archaic Atlantic (1929), the propagandist 1943 German version, S.O.S. TITANIC (1979; TV) and the undeservedly Oscar-laden 1997 romance. Tellingly, while this version of TITANIC did emerge an Oscar winner, it was not in the expected Special Visual Effects category – for which George Pal's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was the sole nominee and eventual winner that year – but the soap opera-like screenplay courtesy of producer Charles Brackett (Billy Wilder's former collaborator), Walter Reisch and Richard L. Breen! Learning that Vincente Minnelli's THE BAND WAGON and Anthony Mann's THE NAKED SPUR were also competing in that category, makes TITANIC's win all the more ludicrous (the Leslie Halliwell Film Guide opines that it was "an excellent example of studio production is squandered on a dim script which arouses no excitement"!); for the record, the film also received a deserving Oscar nod for its production design and director Negulesco an unaccountable one for the Director's Guild Award. Indeed the all-important shipwreck takes up less than a third of the film's typically lean 98-minute running-time and, for the previous hour-plus, we are regrettably treated to the class- conscious disintegrating marriage between "common" Barbara Stanwyck and snobbish Clifton Webb and the blooming romance between 'common' Robert Wagner and snobbish Audrey Dalton (the legitimate offspring of the Stanwyck-Webb union – there is also much eye-rolling emoting over the younger son's attachment to a father who has chosen to disown him!). A measure of the film's ickiness is having the latter repeatedly calling her father "angel"(!) and the former teaching his newfound girlfriend the newest American dance craze "The Navajo Rag"! Apart from the obligatory lush production values, what remains to tickle the viewer's flagging interest is the fine cast assembled to impersonate the fated vessel's crew (stolid captain Brian Aherne and concerned second officer Edmund Purdom – who is surprisingly uncredited despite the amount of screen time and the importance of his role!) and passenger list (defrocked alcoholic priest Richard Basehart, indomitable Molly Brown stand-in Thelma Ritter and cowardly cad Allyn Joslyn); the film's concluding morose statistical narration is provided by a similarly unacknowledged Michael Rennie.