I shall spare you both bitchy preferences about the best Titanic movies and bleating about historical inaccuracies. Jean Negulesco’s film of Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Richard Breen’s Oscar-winning screenplay is polished and low-key in many respects, revolving chiefly around the Sturges family, with mother Julia (Barbara Stanwyck) fleeing to her American homeland with her daughter Annette (Audrey Dalton) and son Norman (Harper Carter) in final rejection of her wealthy, emotionally distant Europhile husband Richard (Clifton Webb). He buys a third-class ticket off a Basque farmer in order to get aboard, and the estranged couple clash with increasing vehemence over her intentions to see their children brought up with a little Yankee vigour and purpose rather than continue to live as snobbish up-scale hotel flotsam like their father. Annette
Webb and Stanwyck’s good performances imbue their characters with innate dignity and restraint. It’s interesting how similarly, if through very different essentials, their characters embody the same New/Old world split that fuelled James Cameron’s 1997 edition, with Julia determined to forcefully replace Richard’s ideals, that of the elitist layabout, with more robust ethics and lifestyle, and of course like so many disaster movies the disaster entwines with human ructions and ironically serves to solve them. Webb’s particularly intelligent job captures both the alarming chill – there’s more than one iceberg in the movie, it sometimes seems – and vulnerability in his character. Gifford
Negulesco imbues the film with a cool, wistful, emotive tone that’s dreamier than any other version of the story. The vignettes of the other shipboard characters are intriguing, including the ship’s crew, led by Brian Aherne as an elegant, philosophical, if rather too young and slim E.J. Smith, and also Richard Basehart’s interesting but underdeveloped alcoholic, fraying mission priest (who, it’s very gently suggested, might be homosexual). An affecting scene has Gifford, Annette, and his fellow scallywags singing college anthems into the wee hours in the First Class lounge, raucous celebration fading into a moment of elegy, with Smith listening and humming along distractedly. As in some of Negulesco’s other films, like Humoresque, he successfully captures a tone of elevated, almost spiritual drama with careful alternations of mood, redolent of a poetic grace note,
and convey an exhausted emotionalism, and visuals, replete with starlit nights, and the ice-floe-riddled sea that surrounds the dying ship, possessing a morbid beauty
.
The underpinnings of the story, however, in spite of the fine writing, are sorely sentimentalised, and Titanic begins to sink along with its ship. The focus of the screenplay has relatively little capacity to absorb the panorama of the tragedy, and what there is of it is rendered far too becalmed, even taking into account the story’s legendary air of stoic restraint. Particularly in the moment of Basehart’s self-sacrifice (Stoker: “For the love of God, you’re not going in there! Basehart: “For the love of God, I am going in there!”), and the rendition of ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ by the passengers arranged in choral harmony just prior to a sudden final plunge, the film evokes the worst variety of Hollywood cornball. Wagner’s performance doesn’t help, his line readings and grating singing often more irritating than charming. Nonetheless, Negulesco’s Titanic is an interesting voyage.
