Titanic Film "A Night to Remember" From Criterion THE coming 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster (on April 15) hasn't escaped the notice of the home video industry, whose eagle-eyed marketing executives have pounced on the opportunity to release what seems to be every known basic-cable documentary, television mini-series and feature film to examine the subject. It would probably take another hundred years to watch them all end to end, so rich has been our culture's fascination with the Titanic, a tragedy large enough to provide a functioning allegory for the apocalypse, yet not so huge as to defy rational comprehension. This is a catastrophe you can get your mind around. The king of this world is James Cameron's 1997 romantic fantasy "Titanic," which returns to theater screens on Wednesday, tricked out in a computer generated 3-D version. But there have been many other film versions, including "Saved From the Titanic," a 1912 one-reeler starring Dorothy Gibson, who had actually survived the disaster and is credited as a co-writer, and a German propaganda film from 1943 that did not please Joseph Goebbels and was quickly banned. The German "Titanic" was restored in 2004 and is available from Kino International. The most sober in tone and historically reliable of the Titanic films remains Roy Ward Baker's British production of 1958, "A Night to Remember." An early release of the Criterion Collection, the film has now been reissued, in Blu-ray and standard definition, from a thoroughly restored print, accompanied by a generous selection of supplementary material. Working from a screenplay by his frequent collaborator, the suspense novelist Eric Ambler, and a best-selling book by Walter Lord, Baker solidifies the metaphor long attached to the Titanic story, turning the doomed ship into a microcosm, a representation in miniature of a society about to submerge itself into the horrors of World War I. Previous versions emphasized the gallantry of the upper classes, as gentlemen in impeccable evening clothes stepped aside to allow their magnificently bejeweled wives and towheaded children to climb into the lifeboats. The German version, inventing a subplot that Mr. Cameron's film would pick up on, turned the ship into a gigantic engine of runaway capitalism, pushed beyond its capacities by a greedy company chairman. But Baker, making his film in the first full flowering of the new Great Britain that came into being with the end of the war and the collapse of imperialism, makes his hero, Kenneth More's Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller, an upright representative of the emerging middle class and managerial caste. The captain of the ship (Laurence Naismith) is a befuddled man of aristocratic mien and regal dimensions whose resemblance to Edward VII does not seem coincidental; the chairman of the White Star Line (Frank Lawton) is a blustery businessman whose pride turns to shame as his enterprise literally begins to sink and he takes downcast refuge among the women and children drifting away in lifeboats. Only Lightoller and his fellow midlevel officers keep their wits about them, calmly directing an evacuation that they know will be too late for many of the passengers and perhaps themselves. With "A Night to Remember" the welfare state Britain of 1958 looks back on the decaying imperial kingdom of 1912, and the film is full of pointed observations about class. Baker gives far more emphasis than Cameron to the plight of the lower-class passengers in steerage, trapped below by iron gates preventing their access to the first-class decks and potential rescue. A sense of hot, pressing anger develops among the crowd, and violent revolution is avoided only at the last second when the order comes down to let the women and children through. But later, when the supply of lifeboats turns out to be inadequate, it is the mid-manager Lightoller who draws order from anarchy by quietly commanding his men to "get organized." Making resourceful use of miniatures, and what seems to be footage borrowed without credit from the German film, Baker creates a sense of teeming spectacle on a relatively tiny budget. A specialist at placing vivid ensembles in constrained quarters (the boarding house in "The October Man," the submarine in "Passage Home"), Baker sketches in dozens of supporting characters with a line or two of dialogue or a characteristic gesture: the clenched jaw and faraway eyes of the ship's architect (Michael Goodliffe) say all there is to say about the failure of dreams. Baker's considerable gifts are also on display in "Flame in the Streets," a 1961 film in color and CinemaScope that recently surfaced as part of VCI Entertainment's J. Arthur Rank collection. A tough, working-class drama of race that anticipated Stanley Kubrick's stacked-deck "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" by six years, the film stars Baker's regular collaborator John Mills as an ambitious union leader who has to reconcile his values with his prejudices when his daughter (Sylvia Syms), a schoolteacher, tells him she intends to marry a Jamaican colleague (Johnny Sekka). Again Baker compresses the action to a single space and a restricted time frame: here, an industrial neighborhood of London on a blustery November Guy Fawkes day. Under the opening credits we see the "Guy" - the Fawkes effigy to be burned at the evening bonfire, and it's wearing a grinning, black Sambo mask. Baker and his screenwriter, Ted Willis, upend the standard assumptions of the liberal do-good film. Mills is no caricatured, Archie Bunker-style racist but a committed leftist who surprises himself with his own visceral reaction to the news; his wife, played without vanity by Brenda De Banzie, instantly opposes the marriage and seems at first a convenient villain, until Baker allows her to reclaim her dignity with a scene that suggests how long she has been ignored by her self-important husband. The old ship has sunk, Baker suggests, but the new one still leaks. "A Night to Remember," Criterion Collection, Blu-ray $39.95, DVD $29.95, not rated; "Flame in the Streets," VCI Entertainment, DVD $19.99, not rated WAR HORSE A horse named Joey and his trainer named Albert (Jeremy Irvine) cross the battlefields of World War I in Steven Spielberg's film based on the successful play; with Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and Niels Arestrup. "While "War Horse" is, like so many of Mr. Spielberg's films, a work of supreme artifice, it is also a self-conscious attempt to revive and pay tribute to a glorious tradition of honest, emotionally direct storytelling," A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in December. Touchstone/Disney, Blu-ray/DVD four-disc combo $45.99; Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.99, DVD $29.99, PG-13 WE BOUGHT A ZOO A recent widower (Matt Damon) with two children buys a country manor that includes a private menagerie, with a staff that includes Scarlett Johansson. Cameron Crowe directed; with Thomas Haden Church and Colin Ford. The creaky screenplay is "finally outstripped by the attractiveness of the performers, those with two legs and more, and especially by the tenderness that Mr. Damon brings to his role," Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times in December. Fox, Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.99, DVD $29.98, PG CHINATOWN A Blu-ray upgrade for Roman Polanski's elegant pastiche of 1930s detective fiction, from a much studied screenplay by Robert Towne. With Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston. Paramount, Blu-ray $26.98, previously released DVD $12.99, R BATTLE ROYALE This 2000 film, the final one from the great Japanese genre director Kinji Fukasaku, is a provocative and violent work in which teams of high school students are sent to a remote island under orders to hunt each other down; any resemblance to "The Hunger Games" is said to be purely coincidental. With Takeshi Kitano and, as the most aggressive of the teenagers, Chiaki Kuriyama. Now available in Blu-ray, in a stand-alone edition ($29.99) and a four-disc "complete collection" ($49.99) that includes both the director's cut and the theatrical cut, as well as the 2003 sequel, "Battle Royale II," directed by Fukasaku's son, Kenta. Anchor Bay, not rated LADY FOR A DAY A street vendor (May Robson) poses as a society matron with the help of a sympathetic gangster (Warren William) in this early hit (1933) by Frank Capra, which he remade in 1961 as "Pocketful of Miracles." Long out of circulation, it's back in a new transfer made from Capra's personal print. Inception Media Group, Blu-ray $29.98, not rated