It’s been 25 years —yes, a quarter of a century— since James Cameron’s marvelous ‘Titanic’ swept half the world’s box offices with a cocktail of spectacle, romanticism and audiovisual genius that continues as fresh as the first day. Three magnificent hours and a quarter from start to finish that could have left us with a much less pleasant taste in our mouths if things had been different in the editing room.
Why am I saying this? Because good old Cameron came to roll an alternate ending that, thankfully, was relegated to the special edition DVD extras which was edited to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the film. A finale between the grotesque, the delirious and the shabby that has recently circulated on social networks again thanks to the magic of the internet.
The horror
In it original ending, the old Rose secretly throws into the sea the pendant that Brock Lovett, the character of Bill Paxton, craves so much. After that, she returns to her bed, surrounded by photographs summarizing her life, and passes away while she is reunited with Jack on a Titanic that never sank. With such a scene, it is difficult not to end up with a knot in the stomach melted in the chair.
The alternative… well, let’s say that the alternative is much more “peculiar”, starting with the fact that starts implying that we are going to witness the suicide of an old woman. When Lovett and Lizzy, Rose’s granddaughter, discover her, the woman reveals that she always had her necklace and that she intends to throw it into the sea, where she belongs.
From then on, the chain of nonsense is amazingbeginning with Rose’s moralizing monologue, worthy of a self-help book, continuing with the moment in which she lets Lovett touch the rock —reminiscent of the check and nun scene in ‘Ghost’— and culminating in the little scream she utters Grandma when she makes good on her threat.
But beware, as they say on the teleshopping, there is still more. As if the creepiness levels weren’t enough, this discarded ending—and rightly so—has a truly horrendous Bill Paxton reaction closeup which leads to a hysterical laugh to heaven captured with a crane shot that would fit perfectly with a Joker movie.
If we add to this a tremendously cloying musicand Lewis Abernathy’s character yelling “That really sucks, lady!” to the old woman, practically containing her desire to attack her, the show is assured. Luckily, the scene in question left us a phrase to remember: “I don’t know what to say to a woman who tried to jump off the Titanic when it wasn’t sinking and then jumped back on when it was sinking”.
Blessed be the cinema and the fact that each feature film has three scripts: the writing of the script, the shooting and the editing.
In Espinof | ‘Titanic’: the hidden detail at the end of James Cameron’s mythical romantic drama that many of us overlook