Titanic

Right off the bat, no, I don't speak German, but I wanted to see this depiction of the Titanic. I am truly puzzled by why a German studio and German performers (okay, they were just enjoying the work) would portray what had been English and American characters in such a sensitive and thoughtful light.

I have heard the first officer is a fictional German character, but hey, they were ALL speaking German!

Did this thing do like the English comedy "Allo, Allo" and have the rest of the cast speak German but with American and English accents? That would have been fun to hear.

I got a copy of "Lady and the Tramp" in Spanish and it is delightful to hear the Italian butchers sing their priceless song in Spanish, but now with Italian accents! It actually worked!

But I digress.

I recognize the dropped names, Ismay and Astor, but it seems the majority of the rest of the cast have undergone name changes. Whatever. The captain seems more like der Burgermeister than he does the ted-dibly English Captain E.J. Smith actually was. I was amused by the crewman bringing the captain his jacket on deck and slipping it on him. I thought to myself, an actual English captain would not have appeared on deck unadorned like that.

Our man Ismay here doesn't look at all as he did in real life, which I thought was puzzling. Ismay in this film is slightly grey and no moustache.

I wondered if the nose was striving for some Jewish look, or was it shooting for the English look. About the last time we see Ismay in this thing, he is shrieking like Adolf, so any stereotype either way was done away with.

Wallace Hartley's band on the Titanic consisted of eight members. In this German version, it would be a large oompah oompah band. In the 1929-30 "Atlantic" film, we hear a Charlston band.

As I watched this film, I looked at the extravagance and thought "are they trying to mimick Hollywood?"

The fashion sense to 1912 didn't connect, it was more "buy war bonds" to me.

Everytime the film would be mucking up for me (that German couple) there would be a saving grace (the wireless operator setting the bird free, while not true, was intriguing to observe).

That the racy steerage woman would survive I found interesting. The tenderness extended in these directions, with what was going on in the world at that time, is bewildering and if this film wasn't released back then after completion, I think that was a terrible shame.

Still, this film just stands as one more film version of the Titanic that is perplexing to watch for historical reasons if nothing else.

Not as bad as the 1929 version, and possesses more dimension than the '53 one.

Titanic must have been the great cause for discussion at the Propaganda Ministry in 1943. Ostensibly put out to show the kind of materialistic greedy people the Germans were fighting back then, it seems as though Joseph Goebbels felt the wrong message might still go out. The original director, Herbert Spelvin, was arrested mid production by the Gestapo and found hanging in his cell the next day. Of course suicide was the official reason given and ostensibly Goebbels was mighty put out about the scenes of panic shown on film. Yet there are certainly enough of them left in the product I saw.

What's showed here is nothing new. But that's the difference between a free society and Nazi Germany. The story has been told a whole lot in both British and American productions. What the Nazis did in this film was to create a wholly fictional second officer named Peterson who serves as the voice of conscience in the film. The villain of course is Ismay the head of the British White Star Line who is looking for the stock in White Star to go up if the much ballyhooed Titanic makes a record crossing in its maiden voyage. Peterson as portrayed by Hans Nielsson is as Aryan as they come, while Ismay looks vaguely like those people we're eliminating as played by E.F.Fuhwanger.

John Jacob Astor is here to represent American capitalism. Such folks as Captain Harry Guggenheim and Mr.&Mrs. Isidor Straus who died in the sinking are eliminated from the story. So is the plucky Denver millionairess Molly Brown.

For a movie that's supposed to show and criticize the British class distinction, very little time is spent on the huddled masses in steerage who were the bulk of the people killed. James Cameron in the recent Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet spent more time with them than this production.

I do however wish that more films of the Nazi era would become available now to view and study. If this one is available on DVD and VHS than this must be mild as compared to others.

Slowly some of the Nazi film industry's work product is becoming available by video and by DVD. Not everything (except if you deal with extreme - right wing groups) but some of their material. TITANIC is one of the few acceptable films.

I think the reason it is acceptable is that we are aware of social inequalities in the disaster that were not officially noted in 1912. The treatment of steerage passengers for example (more first and second class men survived than third class women). The misappropriation of an entire lifeboat by Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon and their small party was another. So was the survival of the President of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay (not Sir Bruce Ismay - he was never knighted before 1912, and he was a social pariah after 1912). But that's just it - Ismay and the Duff Gordons were socially ruined by their survival and the attending circumstances. The British Inquiry of Lord Mersey was not too harsh on them, but the American Inquiry of Senator William Alden Smith certainly was. Ismay was all too happy to leave New York City after Smith got through with him.

So, yes, the story is truthfully full of social unfairness and bigotry and selfishness. But there is also heroism and self sacrifice, and the Goebbels' "Ministry of Information and Propaganda" overlooked that part. Molly Brown, Isidor and Ida Strauss, Benjamin Guggenheim, Thomas Andrews, Lightoller, Philips and Bride, are not mentioned - why should they be. Goebbels wanted to use the disaster as a weapon to poison German and Axis audiences against Britain, America, and Jews. Why honor Americans like Brown, Britains like Andrews, Lightoller, Philips and Bride, and Jews like the Strausses and Guggenheim? So he jettisoned them.

From a technical standpoint TITANIC was an amazing film for 1943 - in fact the British film A NIGHT TO REMEMBER supposedly used some of the scenes of the sinking liner from TITANIC. But the propaganda is always there.

Curiously, the British and Americans did not think of using the war to make a film called LUSITANIA. It might have been a sufficiently more honest answer to Goebbels lies and half-truths. The closest I have seen to that (aside from brief mentions of the Lusitania in FOR ME AND MY GAL, 'TIL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, and NIGHT AND DAY) was a sequence in the Mitchel Leisin film ARISE MY LOVE about the sinking of the steamer Athenia in September 1939 (when it was sunk by a U-boat without warning - Goebbels and Hitler caused an information freeze on that incident). Now, perhaps, we can do films about the Lancastria disaster (bombing and strafing fleeing refugees from Dunkirk with glee - and costing 3,000 - 4,000 lives) or the Cap Ancona massacre of concentration camp victims (about 6,000 lives or more). They show, in my opinion, the selfishness, greed, and class distinctions practiced by Nazis.

It's not that common in movie history that a director angers the producer/distributor of his movie so much that the latter has the former murdered. That's what happened to co-director Herbert Selpin in 1942 before the release of Germany's film contribution to the Titanic saga. Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister and self-anointed arbiter of culture in the Third Reich, had the Gestapo arrest Selpin who was reported dead in his cell the day after. Suicide? Ridiculous.

The Titanic story has been told many times on film, both as documentary and as drama. Interest currently appears to intensify with the same speed as the over-visited wreck rapidly succumbs to a final ballet of disintegration.

Years ago The Film Society of Lincoln Center ran a retrospective of movies produced during the Third Reich. For most attendees it was a revelation, and a disturbing one at that. Many are familiar with the late Leni Reifenstahl's documentary paean to the Olympics (propaganda aside, one of the greatest films of that genre) and the odious "Jude Suss" is the iconographic movie symbolism of Nazi antisemitism. Few were aware how much genuine creativity, free of obvious dogmatism, emerged from that twelve-year period of German darkness and depravity. The retrospective made many think about the complexity of life in 1933-1945 Germany.

One of the films I saw was the 1943 "Titanic" which had a small premiere followed by an order from Goebbels pulling the movie. Ostensibly, Germans were not to be exposed to seeing the panic on the great liner as it foundered (actually most Germans, especially those in urban areas, had more visible frequent reasons to panic by 1943.

Selpin (with co-director Werner Klingler) turned out a sumptuous, ornate and dramatically compelling movie. Largely using the known facts, "Titanic" tells the well worn tale of a ship driven to unreasonable and dangerous speeds in order to set a record. There are some significant deviations. Here, the English first officer - seized with some malady - is replaced by a German seaman named Petersen, a model of experience and rectitude. J. Bruce Ismay, whose social life was justifiably ruined because of his escaping the sinking behemoth, is unrealistically portrayed as a grasping cad whose crudity was not found in the self-absorbed, rich and supinely confident real shipping magnate. The vessel's master, Captain Smith, is overly subservient to Ismay but he responds well to the disaster.

This movie wasn't made on the cheap. Given the deteriorating wartime situation, a lot of marks were expended for terrific sets and fine attire.

There's no real Nazi propaganda. The movie ends with a comment that English greed occasioned the loss of so many lives but very many books and articles from Old Blighty and the U.S. echo that view.

Because of its anti-British utterances, the Allies banned the movie in their sectors in Germany at first while it was freely available in the Soviet zone. Hardly a surprise-that movie maven, Stalin, probably loved this capitalist-bashing film.

KINO VIDEO has performed a real service by releasing the film on DVD. There are two versions-this release is the shorter one without the trial scene in which survivor Petersen rails against the British in court. Actually the movie is stronger for that omission. After she goes down, what else is there really to say?

There are some interesting special features on the disc including an early commercial short made by the White Star Line showing the amenities of RMS Olympic, another luxury liner built before Titanic (technically, Olympic wasn't a sister ship of its more famous and briefly triumphant successor but the differences aren't important).

This is an important release for Titanic buffs but also for those interested in film-making in Nazi Germany. There were movies made that deserve current viewing for reasons apart from their historic association with a barbaric regime.

7/10

I stumbled upon this 1943 German produced depiction of the Titanic events by random chance here in 2023. And seeing that it was made as German propaganda during World War II, I must admit that I was a bit hesitant about watching it.

However, I opted to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, and while the script and storyline, as written by Harald Bratt, Hansi Köck, Herbert Selpin and Walter Zerlett-Olfeniusm wasn't exactly fully historically accurate, then it was actually a surprisingly well-made movie.

Sure, the storyline is one that I am well-familiar with already, even way before 1997 and the James Cameron movie, since I have been historically interested in the events of Titanic since I was a child back in the mid-1980s. And while there were some twists to the historical events here in the movie, I will say that directors Herbert Selpin and Werner Klingler actually put together an entertaining movie. And with it being made in 1943 and in black and white, the movie actually still holds up today.

Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble here, as I have very limited experience with the German cinema, much less the World War II era of German cinema. But the actors and actresses on the cast list put on good performances.

Visually then I was acturally impressed with this 1943 version of the Titanic story. The props and sets were quite amazing, and really looked impressive, even in black and white. It was clear that they had put a lot of effort and money into making the interior of the Titanic come to life.

Something that was a bit annoying about the movie was the German language. Not that I mind the language in itself, but it was just odd to have native English speaking characters in the storyline speak German. But if you can look past that, then this "Titanic" movie as quite good.

My rating of "Titanic" lands on a six out of ten stars.