A Night To Remember | 1958

Long before the event that was James Cameron's Titanic, there was this multi-focused account of the sinking of the unsinkable, packed with moving cameos and social observation.

In Cameron seems to have taken several ideas, plot lines, dialogue and characters from Roy Ward Baker's more modest film.

After RMS Titanic leaves Southampton, and we see the caption April 14, the shots of the Titanic and the passengers on deck were taken from a 1943 German film called Titanic, a piece of Nazi propaganda which featured a hitherto unreported German hero.

Fie this film, a three-hundred foot section of the doomed ship was built in a field near the Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire.

Something larger than the water tank at Pinewood was needed in order to be able to accommodate lifeboats, so seagoing scenes were actually filmed at Ruislip Lido, a reservoir and artificial beach in Ruislip, in the London Borough of Hillingdon, between Ruislip Common, Ruislip Woods and Poors Field. The Lido was originally constructed in 1811 to be a feeder reservoir for the Grand Junction Canal, but was opened in 1933 as a hugely popular lido, with facilities for swimming and boating. It's also featured in Sidney J Furie's 1961 vehicle for Cliff Richard, The Young Ones as well as Richard Lester's 1965 silce of Sizties zaniness The Knack.

The home of Sir Richard and her Ladyship, the upper-crust couple who set out for the doomed liner at the opening of the movie, is the Great Fosters Hotel, Stroude Road, Egham TW20 9UR, in Surrey, a fifteen minute walk from Egham railway station.

 

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