A YEAR OR so after James Cameron hoodwinked the universe into thinking his version of the Titanicdisaster was something other than briny effluent, Hollywood invited some unattached scriptwriters to fashion a similar disaster movie based on the immolation of the LZ 129 Hindenberg. The project never made it past a few initial drafts.
Michael Bay, a notorious director of cacophonous nonsense, did manage to hobble together a pale – ruinously expensive – epic involving the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But the film underperformed at the box office.
As is often the case with the dream factory, the commissioning kingpins had failed to isolate the crucial factors that allowed the year's cinematic behemoth to crush all before it. Both those attempted rip-offs were based on famous catastrophes from 20th century history. But the relevant conflagrations passed by in dazzling flashes (seconds in the case of the German airship's destruction). Pearl Harborwasn't really a disaster movie; it was a film about the long prelude to a disaster and the tedious aftermath to a disaster that happened to actually have a relatively brief disaster buried deep in its soporific core.
The attraction of Titanic's demise – for moviegoers, if not for the unfortunate passengers – is that it happened at feature length.
The gap between iceberg impact and final submersion was a lengthy three hours. That’s more than enough time to have sex in a motorcar, fling a jewel off the bow and allow some stranger to sketch you in the buff.
Consider, also, that the ship contained a comprehensive cross-section of Edwardian society – toffs in the state room, honest toilers in steerage – and it becomes clear why the story has proved so alluring to film-makers.
When Cameron's Titanicemerged in 1997, detractors tended, with some reason, to compare the film unfavourably to Roy Ward Baker's A Night to Remember.Viewed as surprisingly faithful to the facts by the world's many Titanicexperts, the 1958 film starred Kenneth More, the very embodiment of rigid-lipped stoicism, as the most senior officer to survive the sinking. Stalwarts of their theatrical generation such as Kenneth Griffiths, David McCallum and Honor Blackman busied themselves with the lifejackets while a beautifully rendered toy ship descended gracefully towards the bottom of a bathtub.
The film offered charm where Cameron peddled bombast. Defenders of the Canadian's film could, at least, argue that its special effects were something to behold. Fourteen years later, the digitally generated images now look – so quickly has the technology evolved – almost as crude (and somewhat less endearing) than A Night to Remember.
That debate did, however, overlook the fact that there have been over a dozen more cinematic renderings of Titanic's demise. Indeed, two silent shorts emerged in the same year the ship went down.
A Night to Rememberwas, by most reckonings, the seventh film about the disaster. A year before the Cameron film emerged, a TV movie called Titanicwas set loose on viewers; George C Scott and Catherine Zeta-Jones were among those trying to avoid a watery grave.
Then there are all those entertainments that used the ship's sinking as an incidental plot device. One of the 20th century's great coups de théâtre saw lovers in Noel Coward's Cavalcade(filmed in 1933) revealing, right at the end of the relevant scene, that they had been cooing on the deck of the doomed ship. Fans of Upstairs Downstairs, the peerless 1970s TV series, will recall a similar ploy being used to telegraph the coming demise of Lady Bellamy.
The notion of a varied slice of society meeting its end at a leisurely pace will always appeal to film-makers. The next crack at the story will, however, seem more than a little over-familiar. At this month’s Cannes Film Festival, it was confirmed that a 3-D version of Cameron’s film will dock in cinemas next Spring. Well, if that’s what the young people want . . .
A Night to Rememberis available on DVD.
