Awesome / A Night to Remember

• While the real Lightoller has his share of failures in the Titanic disaster, his fictional depiction in A Night to Remember is full of Awesome efforts. Most notable is the fact that he is able to confidently yell out directions to those around him...all while swimming in 28°F/- 2°C water!
• Lightoller one-ups himself on numerous occasions, but the band members at the end have to take the biscuit.
  • To clarify: the band had been playing throughout the loading of the lifeboats to help keep calm. When the last boat has left and the ship is beginning its final plunge, the bandmaster, Wallace Hartley, bids his bandmates farewell, then begins to play "Nearer My God to Thee." The rest of the band soon joins in, playing one final hymn to offer some consolation for their fellow passengers who are about to die.
• There was also 'The Unsinkable Molly Brown', demanding that the lifeboat turn around and put back to try and rescue as many of the people in the water as they could. She also got the women in the boat with her to join in working the oars.
  • This exchange when one of the crewmen assigned to her lifeboat is panicking after the sinking:
    Hitchens: We've got no water, no compass, no charts...
    Molly: Aw, shut up!
• That Thomas Andrews, the Titanic's lead architect, retires to the smoking lounge to quietly await the end deserves a mention here.
• The old gentleman who we see quietly reading in the lounge after everyone else has fled is never even named, but displays classic Stiff Upper Lip at its finest.
  • He might not be named, but he is meant to be William Thomas Stead, a journalist and writer whose work formed the basics of modern journalism. He had written a story about a ship like Titanic sinking, and was at peace knowing he wasn't going to survive.
• An obviously rich old lady in the lifeboats hears a woman from steerage wailing that she can't go without her husband. The rich lady replies "Certainly not! Kindly help me out of here."
• The crew of the RMS Carpathia. While the SS Californian is implicated for ignoring the Titanic’s sinking, the radio operator of the Carpathia instantly rushes to the captain about the emergency with the distress call he just received, who hesitates for only a few seconds before ordering the ship to race to the emergency at full speed. Was even more awesome in Real Life when you consider that a) they went through the heart of the very iceberg field that sank the Titanic in the dark^note In real life, Rostron would later reflect that "I can only conclude that another hand than mine was on the helm.", and b) by running the boilers at full capacity for the whole journey (as well as cutting off heat and hot water through much of the ship and locking the safety valves shut), Carpathia exceeded her official top speed of 14 knots by 125%, reaching 17.5 knots in her desperate race for Titanic. The result shaved nearly an hour off the Carpathia's journey, saving God only knows how many lives. Never again in her long and storied career would the Carpathia ever achieve that much speed.
• The passengers of one partially-lowered lifeboat request another sailor for their boat. There are no sailors nearby, but one passenger, Major Peuchen, is a yachtsman and says he can get in the ship. Lightoller challenges him to climb down the rigging to the lifeboat to prove his worthiness as a seaman, and Peuchen does so with little trouble.
• One crewman ties several deck chairs together to use as a raft.
• Drunk or not, Baker Joughin has the presence of mind to throw several deck chairs overboard for people to grab as flotation devices. He is also one of the last people able to keep his balance and keep walking forward during the downward plunge without having to grab anything.
• Fourth Officer Lowe politely but firmly insists that a half-filled boat take on the passengers in his boat and then rows back to the ship to try to rescue people in the water.

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