Its screenplay by Eric Ambler was based on the 1955 book by Walter Lord, depicting the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912, after it struck an iceberg.

The production team, supervised by producer William MacQuitty, used blueprints of the ship to create authentic sets, while Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall and ex-Cunard Commodore Harry Grattidge worked as technical advisors on the film.

On 14 April, in the Atlantic, the ship receives a number of ice warnings from steamers, which are relayed to Captain Edward Smith, who orders a lookout.

Andrews calculates to Smith that the Titanic will sink in two hours, and both realise that the ship lacks sufficient lifeboat capacity for all the passengers.

58 miles away, the RMS Carpathia's wireless operator receives the distress call and alerts Captain Arthur Rostron, who orders his ship to turn around.

Ida and Isidor Straus refuse to be separated, inadvertently setting an example for Mrs Clarke, who decides to stay with her husband until Andrews advises them on how to survive.

Passengers—among them Murphy, Gallagher and Farrel—retreat towards the stern as it rises into the air, while Lightoller and other able seamen struggle to free the two remaining collapsible lifeboats, as the Titanic's bow submerges.

In Ray Johnson's documentary The Making of 'A Night to Remember' (1993), Lord says that when he wrote his book, there was no mass interest in the Titanic,[8] and he was the first writer in four decades to attempt a grand-scale history of the disaster, synthesising written sources and survivors' first-hand accounts.

So did producer MacQuitty, who had vivid memories of, as a boy of six, watching the launch of the Titanic at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast on 31 May 1911 and seeing it depart on its maiden voyage the following April.

[10] It was described as "the biggest, most lavish, most expensive thing of its kind" attempted up to that point, with 31 sets, 107 actors, 72 speaking parts, and 3,000 gallons of water and costing $95,000 ($816,000 at 2023 prices).

Rains's narration was used "to bridge the almost limitless number of sequences of life aboard the doomed liner", as a reviewer put it,[13] and closed with his declaration that "never again has Man been so confident.

[16] In addition to basing the script – both in action and dialogue – on Lord's book, the filmmakers achieved nuanced performances and authentic atmosphere by consulting several actual Titanic survivors, who served as technical advisors.

He infiltrated the set during the sinking scene, hoping to 'go down with the ship', but was discovered by the director, who ordered him off and vetoed this unscheduled appearance due to the actors' union rules.

Charles Lightoller's widow Sylvia was also consulted during production, at one point visiting Pinewood Studios and meeting with Kenneth More, whom she introduced to her children on set.

[20] Also, the film diverges from both the book and the NBC TV adaptation in focusing on a central character, Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who performs actions that other crewmembers did and said during the actual disaster.

Its conclusion reflects Lord's world-historical theme of a "world changed forever" with a fictional conversation between Lightoller and Colonel Archibald Gracie, sitting on a lifeboat.

[21] Producer MacQuitty had originally contracted with Shaw, Savill & Albion Line to use its former flagship QSMV Dominion Monarch to shoot scenes, but the company pulled out of the production at the last minute, citing that they did not want to use one of their liners to recreate the Titanic sinking.

Harold Sanderson would later succeed J. Bruce Ismay as president of the International Mercantile Marine Company, J.P. Morgan's shipping conglomerate that owned the White Star Line.

MacQuitty eventually got permission from Ship Breaking Industries in Faslane, Scotland to film scenes aboard RMS Asturias, a 1920s ocean liner that the company was scrapping.

There was no tank big enough at Pinewood Studios to film the survivors struggling to climb into lifeboats, so it was done in the open-air swimming bath at Ruislip Lido, at 2:00 on an icy November morning.

But it was too late...[23]Four clips from the Nazi propaganda film Titanic (1943) were used in A Night to Remember; two of the ship sailing in calm waters during the day, and two of a flooding walkway in the engine room.

[25] Selpin himself was arrested on the instruction of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels during production in early August 1942, for offering a negative opinion of the German military while directing this earlier Nazi-era film.

Although there was, in fact, a Martin Gallagher travelling steerage aboard the Titanic, his actions in the film are fictionalised and although he survives the sinking, he actually died in real life.

John Chapman's body was recovered by the cable ship Mackay-Bennett, and there were no mentions or indications that suggest that he had been killed by a falling funnel.

They didn't fall for the ruse, and Yates was captured a couple of months later (he was wanted on federal charges connected with postal thefts).

The fictional Yates says, "Good luck and God bless you", the words spoken by an unknown swimmer at Collapsible B, whom survivor fireman Walter Hurst thought was Captain Smith.

The painting in the first class smoking room is incorrectly shown as depicting the entrance to New York Harbor, while it actually depicted the entrance to Plymouth Sound, which Titanic had been expected to visit on her return voyage (there was a painting of New York Harbor at this spot on RMS Olympic, a sister ship of Titanic).

[40] After its December 1958 US premiere, Bosley Crowther called the film a "tense, exciting and supremely awesome drama...[that] puts the story of the great disaster in simple human terms and yet brings it all into a drama of monumental unity and scope"; according to Crowther:[41] this remarkable picture is a brilliant and moving account of the behavior of the people on the Titanic on that night that should never be forgotten.

It is an account of the casualness and flippancy of most of the people right after the great ship has struck (even though an ominous cascade of water is pouring into her bowels); of the slow accumulation of panic that finally mounts to a human holocaust, of shockingly ugly bits of baseness and of wonderfully brave and noble deeds.The film won numerous awards, including a Golden Globe Award for Best English-Language Foreign Film, and received high praise from reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic.

[49] Catherine Shoard of The Guardian gave the film four out of five, saying: "A restrained, nearly austere ensemble drama that manages to intertwine a dozen different stories without tripping up on any of them, it relies on real-life survivor testimony for almost every line and incident, to immensely moving and dignified effect.