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A Review of "Titanic"


Let’s just get straight to the point: this is not really much of a “Titanic movie” despite its title and the focus of the story. It is more of a drama that just happens to take place aboard the doomed ocean liner. For that reason, certain historical inaccuracies and omissions can be ignored, though not entirely forgiven. There are various moments during the film when we forget there is even a Titanic at all. However, due to the strength of the script and acting, it serves to make the striking of the iceberg as much of a shock to us as it was to the passengers in real life. Unlike A Night to Remember and the later James Cameron version, there are no signs of impending doom anywhere in the story. No hints dropped, no melodramatic self-fulfilling prophecies hidden within the layers. Yes, we all know how it ends, but many disaster movies tend to keep that certain cloud of doom around us at all times. This 1953 Titanic plows through both sea and screen in blissful ignorance.

The rest of the review is available at https://gcaggiano.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/movie-review-titanic-1953/

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I am in the middle of watching this movie for the first time and I too am noticing the points you made.

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Thanks, and a good point. The movie plays well as just a story as well as a period piece (the songs, for instance, Robert Wagner's Purdue connection,--not Princeton--among other nice touches). The final scenes of father and son on deck are as moving than the larger tragedy of the sinking. A nice looking film, and very much of its own time, it was, or so I've read, the last black and white non-CinemaScope film 20th Century-Fox made. In this it's a fond farewell to that studio's best years, roughly the previous twelve to fifteen, just prior to the world war..

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