A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker, 1958)

8.5/10
Roy Ward Baker's 1958 film about the sinking of the Titanic achieves a depth of humanity that Cameron's 1997 film never did. A Night to Remember succeeds by focusing instead on the minutae of the lives of various passengers (a child's abandoned hobby horse, a passenger going back to get her lucky stuffed pig), and its close attention to historical accuracy, as best as possible with the knowledge of the times. In fact this movie inspired Cameron so much he lifted several scenes and characters wholesale from the film (the musicians who continue to play as the ship goes down, for instance) but lost something along the way. Of course the knee-jerk reaction is to insist anything is better than Cameron's version, especially something made almost 40 years prior, but in this case it's plainly true in my opinion.