History Within History
Today's review, for reasons that you can probably guess, is the 1943 movie Titanic.
The story of the Titanic has fascinated audiences ever since the ship went down (there was even a silent movie version of the story starring one of the survivors made one month after the sinking). Thanks to the combination of the luxury and the tragedy, there are a lot of directions you can take a story based around the sinking. In 1943, the Nazis made a movie simply called Titanic, and went in a very specific and somewhat surprising direction; propaganda.
In this movie’s version of events, the White Star Line is in financial trouble after stretching themselves thin to build the Titanic. In an attempt to boost their stock, Bruce Ismay (Ernst Fritz Fürbringer) decides to push the Titanic to go as fast as possible, thus breaking records and proving just how marvelous she is. Captain Smith (Otto Wernicke) reluctantly goes along with this, but the only German officer on the ship, Petersen (Hans Nielsen) strongly protests the whole way. As we wait for the inevitable, we see a few other stories playing out, including a romance between a maid and one of the musicians, a Cuban thief and the detective on his trail, the scheming of John Jacob Astor (Karl Schönböck), and the complicated relationship Russian aristocrat Sigrid Olinsky (Sybille Schmitz) has with both Ismay and Petersen. Then the ship hits the iceberg, and things get even more complicated.
I don’t know what the reaction of audiences were at the time, but watching this nowadays is both fascinating and mildly amusing. It’s interesting to see the story of the Titanic from an outside country’s perspective, but that aspect is vastly overshadowed by the obvious hatred the filmmakers have for capitalism (and perhaps for the British in general). The movie opens with scheming industrialists, paints almost all the rich people in the movie as bad, and ends with a title card that’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a propaganda film. I also like how they drive the point home further by explicitly labeling two people (Petersen and a scientist) as Germans and then making sure they’re the most correct and noble people in the whole movie. I’m not one for being preached to, but there’s enough historical distance in this case that it feels more like a period oddity than something I can take seriously.
Moving away from the propaganda to focus on the story, it’s simultaneously predictable and unpredictable. It’s predictable in that there are a lot of melodramatic elements and a few moments that highlight the gap between first and third class (second class doesn’t seem to exist in this universe). On the other hand, the rich/poor divide isn’t as emphasized as it normally is; in fact, there’s a scene where the third class marches right up to first class to demand answers and nobody stops them. There’s also surprisingly little material about the ship sinking. While the movie quickly gets us up to April 14th, the day of the sinking, it spends most of the movie on the various relationships and foreshadowing of the disaster. Then, once the collision occurs, the focus remains on the characters instead of turning into a special effects spectacular. This is refreshing on the one hand, but may make you feel a bit cheated if you came in expecting the effects. In addition, there are way too many characters vying for screentime, and while we can at least tell who’s who (mostly) most of them don’t serve much of a purpose, and a good number of them don’t get an official conclusion to their story. We can hazard a guess as to what happened, of course, but it would have been nice to have the loose ends firmly tied up.
If you’re interested in this movie because you’re a Titanic buff, this is not the movie for you. Leaving aside the hatred of capitalists, it gets a lot wrong. Most of the officer names are made up or slightly off from the original names, not to mention inserting a fictional officer as the movie’s mouthpiece. The movie does mention repeatedly how cold the temperature is, but fails to bring that to its logical conclusion once people start landing in the water. The loading of the lifeboats is surprisingly calm and matter of fact. Above all, though, the ship doesn’t really seem to be sinking until the last five minutes-the deck doesn’t even start tilting until all the lifeboats are gone. I know we shouldn’t expect accuracy in a German propaganda film, and it had only been thirty-one years since the sinking, so there wasn’t as much information then as there is now, but if you’re really into the story of the Titanic, this may be a bit rough.
On the other hand, if you’re a movie buff who also happens to like the Titanic story, it can be fun to see how this movie influenced two of the most famous Titanic movies. Rumor has it that the 1958 A Night to Remember lifted a few shots straight from this movie, and while I’d have to rewatch that movie to confirm, there are definitely a few shots that were borrowed if not outright stolen. More interestingly to me, not only does Astor talk about a “blue diamond” a few times, there’s a scene where a woman is looking up at her lover as she descends in a lifeboat that I’m pretty sure Cameron used as inspiration for when the same thing happens to Jack and Rose in the 1997 movie. Well, you know what they say; “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
While I’d overall say this movie is enjoyable, I also think you need to have the right interests to be able to fully appreciate it. Still, as long as you treat it as a time capsule, I think you’ll find at least one thing to enjoy about it (if nothing else, the costumes are great). The movie’s probably never going to go down in history as a great film, but I think it deserves to be remembered as a historical oddity if nothing else.
The story of the Titanic has fascinated audiences ever since the ship went down (there was even a silent movie version of the story starring one of the survivors made one month after the sinking). Thanks to the combination of the luxury and the tragedy, there are a lot of directions you can take a story based around the sinking. In 1943, the Nazis made a movie simply called Titanic, and went in a very specific and somewhat surprising direction; propaganda.
In this movie’s version of events, the White Star Line is in financial trouble after stretching themselves thin to build the Titanic. In an attempt to boost their stock, Bruce Ismay (Ernst Fritz Fürbringer) decides to push the Titanic to go as fast as possible, thus breaking records and proving just how marvelous she is. Captain Smith (Otto Wernicke) reluctantly goes along with this, but the only German officer on the ship, Petersen (Hans Nielsen) strongly protests the whole way. As we wait for the inevitable, we see a few other stories playing out, including a romance between a maid and one of the musicians, a Cuban thief and the detective on his trail, the scheming of John Jacob Astor (Karl Schönböck), and the complicated relationship Russian aristocrat Sigrid Olinsky (Sybille Schmitz) has with both Ismay and Petersen. Then the ship hits the iceberg, and things get even more complicated.
I don’t know what the reaction of audiences were at the time, but watching this nowadays is both fascinating and mildly amusing. It’s interesting to see the story of the Titanic from an outside country’s perspective, but that aspect is vastly overshadowed by the obvious hatred the filmmakers have for capitalism (and perhaps for the British in general). The movie opens with scheming industrialists, paints almost all the rich people in the movie as bad, and ends with a title card that’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a propaganda film. I also like how they drive the point home further by explicitly labeling two people (Petersen and a scientist) as Germans and then making sure they’re the most correct and noble people in the whole movie. I’m not one for being preached to, but there’s enough historical distance in this case that it feels more like a period oddity than something I can take seriously.
Moving away from the propaganda to focus on the story, it’s simultaneously predictable and unpredictable. It’s predictable in that there are a lot of melodramatic elements and a few moments that highlight the gap between first and third class (second class doesn’t seem to exist in this universe). On the other hand, the rich/poor divide isn’t as emphasized as it normally is; in fact, there’s a scene where the third class marches right up to first class to demand answers and nobody stops them. There’s also surprisingly little material about the ship sinking. While the movie quickly gets us up to April 14th, the day of the sinking, it spends most of the movie on the various relationships and foreshadowing of the disaster. Then, once the collision occurs, the focus remains on the characters instead of turning into a special effects spectacular. This is refreshing on the one hand, but may make you feel a bit cheated if you came in expecting the effects. In addition, there are way too many characters vying for screentime, and while we can at least tell who’s who (mostly) most of them don’t serve much of a purpose, and a good number of them don’t get an official conclusion to their story. We can hazard a guess as to what happened, of course, but it would have been nice to have the loose ends firmly tied up.
If you’re interested in this movie because you’re a Titanic buff, this is not the movie for you. Leaving aside the hatred of capitalists, it gets a lot wrong. Most of the officer names are made up or slightly off from the original names, not to mention inserting a fictional officer as the movie’s mouthpiece. The movie does mention repeatedly how cold the temperature is, but fails to bring that to its logical conclusion once people start landing in the water. The loading of the lifeboats is surprisingly calm and matter of fact. Above all, though, the ship doesn’t really seem to be sinking until the last five minutes-the deck doesn’t even start tilting until all the lifeboats are gone. I know we shouldn’t expect accuracy in a German propaganda film, and it had only been thirty-one years since the sinking, so there wasn’t as much information then as there is now, but if you’re really into the story of the Titanic, this may be a bit rough.
On the other hand, if you’re a movie buff who also happens to like the Titanic story, it can be fun to see how this movie influenced two of the most famous Titanic movies. Rumor has it that the 1958 A Night to Remember lifted a few shots straight from this movie, and while I’d have to rewatch that movie to confirm, there are definitely a few shots that were borrowed if not outright stolen. More interestingly to me, not only does Astor talk about a “blue diamond” a few times, there’s a scene where a woman is looking up at her lover as she descends in a lifeboat that I’m pretty sure Cameron used as inspiration for when the same thing happens to Jack and Rose in the 1997 movie. Well, you know what they say; “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
While I’d overall say this movie is enjoyable, I also think you need to have the right interests to be able to fully appreciate it. Still, as long as you treat it as a time capsule, I think you’ll find at least one thing to enjoy about it (if nothing else, the costumes are great). The movie’s probably never going to go down in history as a great film, but I think it deserves to be remembered as a historical oddity if nothing else.