February 18: Titanic (1953 -- Jean Negulesco)

★★★
This is the fourth Titanic I’ve seen, and I’m enjoying how each film uses the disaster for a different purpose.  As would be expected from a 1953 Hollywood film, there’s a romance at the center here; Richard and Julia’s marriage has grown stale, and as they duke it out, there’s a major melodramatic reveal as well as the sinking of the great ship.  This is, however, Hollywood, and love eventually triumphs, if not over the cold Atlantic then over the coldness in the marriage.

Titanic 1953 has a larger idea to develop, too: the difference between good ole American values and the artificiality of European culture.  The source of the problems between Richard and Julia is this cultural difference because Julia wants the kids to have a stable home and to grow up without the ongoing seasonal migrations and the pretension that make up their European life.  Richard, however, wants them to fit into European high society with elegance and superficiality.  Americans are fun, earthy, energetic, warm and frank in this film, while Europeans are dull, mannered, stolid, cold and indirect.  Characters from the beau Gifford through the plainspoken Maude demonstrate the American outlook on life.  Titanic details the contrast in cultures most directly though the character arc of Richard, who is so superficial that he breaks the heart of his own young son by coldly rejecting him only to move toward the American value of family by embracing him at the end of the film. 

Perhaps an echo of the cultural duality at the center of the film, the characters here often move in contrasting light with bright whites and dark blacks.  While one character is walking to the bridge, we only see the headless torsos of crew members who are standing in sharp black and white.  And later, while Richard is shaving in the lounge, Julia startlingly emerges from the shadows of a corner to engage him in bright whiteness.  Even the kiss of Gifford and Annette is a series of rapidly shifting black-and-white.  This cinematography adds to the interest in the film, building an air of vague film noir menace that's first suggested in the opening calving of a white iceberg. 

Titanic 1953 isn’t the best cinema treatment of the catastrophe, but if we see the British cultural/documentary point of view in A Night to Remember and National Socialist ideology in 1943’s Titanic, here we watch Hollywood focus the tragedy on the love travails of a couple working though different cultural values.  In gorgeous black-and-white.  It’s a worthy addition to the Titanic canon.