Reviews: Enemy of the State, A Night to Remember

Will Smith is an innocent Baltimore barrister who is implicated in a national security scandal in Enemy of the State.

Will Smith in the 1999 film Enemy of the State.

A far more sombre affair than James Cameron’s Oscar-winning Titanic, the 1958 British drama A Night to Remember (Saturday, 9.50pm, Fox Classics) was adapted from Walter Lord’s distinguished book and directed with workmanlike precision by dependable British pro Roy Ward Baker. Kenneth More plays the acknowledged hero of the tragic evening, Charles Lightoller, with a supporting cast that includes future Bond girl and The Avengers star Honor Blackman, as well as Alec McCowan and future The Man from U.N.C.L.E. actor David McCallum as the wireless operators who switched to Morse code for the first time.

Continuing on the acronym front, among the first Hollywood films to use the P.O.V., or point-of-view, approach to camerawork was actor Robert Montgomery’s directorial debut, the 1947 Raymond Chandler-based detective thriller Lady in the Lake (Monday, 3.25pm, TCM). It is based on Chandler’s 1944 novel but the writer didn’t like it much — which is a pity, as this is a genuine cinematic curio that may well wear it’s conceit thin to the viewer but nevertheless represents an unusually avant-garde gamble for the notoriously conservative and populist Hollywood establishment.

Another risk-taking moviemaker is director Robert Zemeckis, whose upcoming 3-D drama The Walk stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the French highwire artist who famously walked from one tower of the World Trade Center to the other via tightrope in 1974. This figures, as Zemeckis is the modern master of discreetly integrating special effects into his movies (he directed Forrest Gump, the Back to the Future trilogy, Cast Away and others). Among his best-loved achievements to date is the 1988 live-action/animated comedy thriller Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Sunday, 7.30pm, Family).

Bob Hoskins is the private eye who discovers malfeasance among the Hollywood studio heads and the animated characters, who in this world exist in real life alongside flesh-and-blood humans.

The film was made before computer-generated special effects (CGI, to continue the parade of acronyms), and to Zemeckis’s credit viewers buy into the conceit immediately, which made the film a huge box-office success. And if any recent film deserves a sequel …

Speaking of sequels, director Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State (Sunday, 4.10pm, Action) doesn’t bill itself as such. Yet a briefly glimpsed photo of co-star Gene Hackman, a privacy guru here, taken from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance thriller The Conversation, suggests otherwise. Will Smith stars as an innocent Baltimore barrister (is there such a thing?) who must clear his name when implicated in a national security scandal.

A Night to Remember (PG) 3.5 stars

Saturday, 9.50pm, Fox Classics (113)

Enemy of the State (M) 3.5 stars

Sunday, 4.10pm, Action (406)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (PG) 4 stars

Sunday, 7.30pm, Family (405)