A NIGHT TO REMEMBER—-Walter Lord’s classic 1955 book had as much accuracy as was available at the time on the 43-year-old sinking of the Titanic, with deep-dive exploration & verifiable conclusions waiting 31 years in the future. After a hit adaptation for live TV came this highly-regarded 1958 epic, impressively produced (the $1,680,000 budget huge by British standards at the time), starring one of Britain’s most popular, likable and convincing leading men, Kenneth More, superbly directed by Roy Ward Baker.

Thriller novelist and veteran screenwriter Eric Ambler did a fine job weaving cinema sense out of Lord’s multi-layered tale, not in terms of pacing, as Lord’s book already raced like an action film, but in editing a wealth of detail to fit into 123 minutes so that it not only persuaded as a documentary but resounded as moving drama. A vivid emotional memory wake had been carved five years earlier by the first Hollywood version.

After a fast half-hour of background and smart, quick-sketched introductions of at least two dozen passengers and crew, the ship hits the fan. Tension never lets up as the tragedy unfolds in not much less time than the actual sinking (which took two hours and forty minutes).

Excellent camera (ace Geoffrey Unsworth), class-A sets, model work and special effects, taut editing and suitably stirring music scoring from William Alwyn complement uniformly fine performances. The script deftly allows equal time for irony & sacrifice, cowardice & devotion, panic & duty, all beneath & beyond the rigid, infuriating class distinctions and manners of the age. For each who would “go down like a gentleman” there was another sniffing with disdain over the noise made by all those drowning steerage passengers. Gallantry and hypocrisy. Certainty and hubris.  The technological marvel of the day, and natures icy, implacable indifference. The North Atlantic checkmates ‘unsinkable’.

At 43, the affable More was a big star in England, and his confident turn here as Second Officer Lightoller brought him greater international fandom. He’s backed by a deckful of actors who would soon be familiar to wider audiences: Honor Blackman, David McCallum, Laurence Naismith, and—in blink-and-miss bits—unknowns Bernard Fox and Desmond Llewelyn.

This stellar rendering of the timeless story is considered by many the fall-back favorite of the three great films about RMS Titanic. I love ’em all. Growing up with the 1953 Clifton Webb/Barbara Stanwyck heartbreaker, tireless readings of Lord’s gripping book, this classic,  then Cameron’s eye-boggling 1997 superspectacle; like zillions of Titanic fanciers around the globe, we’re soul-connected to Lightoller, Capt. Smith, Mr.Andrews, Molly Brown, Guggenheim and Astor, Mr. & Mrs. Strauss, the aghast lookouts in the crows nest, watertight doors, the drunken cook, the heroic bandsmen…

With Michael Goodlife, Kenneth Griffith, John Merivale, Frank Lawton, Tucker McGuire, George Rose, Michael Bryant, Harold Goldblatt, Norman Rossington, Andrew Keir, John Richardson.

* Purists don’t count the 1943 Nazi-made farrago or the several lame TV movies.