Titanic
Directed by Jean Negulesco
Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Ricard L. Breen
1953/USA
Twentieth Century Fox
First viewing/Netflix Rental
[box] Annette Sturges: Mama, you should have protested. It’s a really bad table. There’s not a person we know at the end of this room.
Julia Sturges: Be brave Annette. These tragedies happen sometimes in life.[/box]
What’s a film about the Titanic disaster without a little melodrama?
There are several subplots running through the film. The main one concerns the demise of the marriage of Richard Ward Sturges (Clifton Webb) and his wife Julia (Barbara Stanwyck). Julia has left Paris for America with their two children Annette (Audrey Dalton), who is in her late teens, and Norman, who is maybe twelve. Richard finds out at the last moment and gets on the sold out ship by buying the ticket of the father of a steerage class family. He promptly moves from steerage to first class and confronts his wife.
The children adore their father and he obviously loves them. We find out that Julia, a “common” Midwest girl when she married Richard, does not want her children spoiled by the Parisian lifestyle or her husband’s effete manners and class-conscious world view. It is possibly too late for Annette, who when she finds out that the stay is to be permanent demands to be taken “home” to Paris. Julia is insistent that Norman is hers to stay however.
In addition to the drama about Richard and Julia we get the shipboard romance between Annette and Purdue man Gifford Rogers (Robert Wagner), a defrocked alcoholic priest (Richard Basehart) and words of homespun wisdom from Maude Young (Thelma Ritter), a standin for the Unsinkable Molly Brown. We all know how this will end but not necessarily who will rise to the occasion. With Brian Aherne as Captain Smith.
I was not crazy about the Academy Award winning Screenplay which managed to be both overblown and not dramatic enough somehow to carry us through to the sinking. Things get relatively exciting when the ship hits the iceberg. Stanwyck and Webb are both very good. It was good to see Webb with play a part with some real emotion behind the waspishness. Robert Wagner is made to sing and dance – a mistake in my opinion. In sum, this was entertaining enough but nothing great.
The DVD contains two commentaries. One is by film critic Richard Schickel. The other one, which I preferred, is by Sylvia Stoddard, a Titanic buff, with a cinematographer and actors Audrey Dalton and Robert Wagner. The actors made Stanwyck sound like one of the nicest people ever. I had not known before this that she was able to produce real tears on cue!
Titanic won the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. It was nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.
