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Titanic (1943 film)

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Titanic
Directed byWerner Klingler
Herbert Selpin
Written byHerbert Selpin
Walter Zerlett-Olfenius
Produced byWilly Reiber
StarringSybille Schmitz
Hans Nielsen
Distributed byUFA
Release date
10 November 1943
Running time
85 minutes
LanguageGerman

Titanic was a 1943 Nazi propaganda film made during World War II in Berlin by Tobis Productions for UFA, which was later banned from Nazi Germany by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The film used the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a setting for an attempt to discredit British and American capitalist dealings and glorify the bravery and selflessness of German men. Today, Titanic is known for its extremely dark production history and, ironically, became a symbol of the corruption and "sinking" of the Third Reich itself.

Cult icon Sybille Schmitz, who would achieve everlasting fame twenty-seven years after her death when R. W. Fassbinder adapted her unhappy life into his famous film Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, has her most widely accessible role for today's audience in this film.

History of the film

The film was shot on board the SS Cap Arcona, a passenger cruise ship which itself was sunk a few days before the end of World War II in Europe with a loss of life far heavier than that on the actual Titanic. The scenes with the lifeboats were filmed on the Baltic Sea and some of the interior scenes were shot in Tobis Studios.

Titanic was the most expensive German production up until that time and endured many production difficulties, including a clash of egos, massive creative differences and general war-time frustrations. The film's original director, Herbert Selpin was heard making unflattering comments about the Kriegsmarine officers, who were more concerned with molesting the female cast members rather than doing their job as marine consultants of the film. His close friend and co-writer of the script, Walter Zerlett-Olfenius, reported him to the Gestapo and Selpin was promptly arrested and personally questioned by Joseph Goebbels, who was the driving force behind the Titanic project. Within twenty-four hours of his arrest, Herbert Selpin was found hanged in his jail cell, which was ruled a suicide.[1] The cast and crew were angry and attempted to retaliate, but were quickly silenced with fear for their own safety. The unfinished film, the production of which spiraled wildly out control, was in the end completed by Werner Klingler.

The premiere was supposed to be in early 1943, but the theatre that housed the answer print was bombed the night before the big event. The film went on to have a lacklustre premiere in Paris around Christmas of that same year, but in the end, Goebbels banned it altogether, stating that the German people, at that point going through almost nightly Allied bombing raids, were less than enthusiastic about seeing a film that portrayed mass death and panic.[2]

Titanic was re-discovered in 1949, but was quickly banned in most western and capitalist countries. After the fifties, the film went back into obscurity, sometimes showing on German television. But in 1992, a censored, low quality VHS copy, was released in Germany. This version deleted the strongest propaganda scenes, which immensely watered down its controversial content. Finally, in 2005, Titanic was completely restored and, for the first time, the uncensored version was released in a special edition DVD by Kino Video.

Plot

The movie opens with a proclamation to the White Star stock holders that their stocks are currently falling. The president of White Star Line J. Bruce Ismay promises to reveal a secret during the maiden voyage of the Titanic that will change the fate of the stocks. He alone knows that the ship can break the world record in speed and that, he thinks, will raise the stock value. He and the board of the White Star plan to lower the stocks by selling even their own stocks in order to buy them back at a lower price. They plan to buy them back just before the news about the record speed of the ship will be published to the press. (In reality, this was impossible to have occurred, since at the time the real White Star Line was a wholly owned subsidiary of the International Mercantile Marine conglomerate and was not a publicly traded company.)

The issue of capitalism and the stock market plays a dominant role throughout the movie. The hero of the film is fictional German First Officer Herr Petersen (played by Hans Nielsen) on the ill-fated voyage of the British ocean liner RMS Titanic in 1912. He begs the ship's rich and snobbish owners to slow down the ship's speed, but they refuse and the Titanic hits an iceberg and sinks. The passengers in first class are shown to be sleazy cowards while Petersen, his lover Sigrid Olinsky (Sybille Schmitz), and other German passengers in steerage are shown as brave and kind. Peterson manages to rescue many passengers, convince Sigrid to get into a lifeboat (in a scene which was famously echoed in the 1997 film) and saves a young girl, who was obviously left to die in her cabin by an uncaring, callous British capitalist mother. The film ends with the British Inquiry into the disaster, where Peterson testifies against Bruce Ismay, condemning his actions, but Ismay is cleared of all charges and the blame is placed squarely on the deceased Captain Smith's shoulders. The epilogue states that "the deaths of 1,500 people remains un-atoned, forever a testament of Britain's endless quest for profit."

Themes and propaganda context

Titanic makes the allegory of the liner's loss specifically about British avarice rather than, as most Titanic retellings do, about general human arrogance and presumption. This fit in with other works of anti-British propaganda of the time such as My life for Ireland and Der Fuchs von Glenarvon; however, the scenes of British and French panic and desperation undermined this effect, contributing to its ban by Goebbels.[2]

Cast

Allegations about A Night to Remember

The film, which was known for having exceptional special effects for its time, was alleged to have various shots spliced into the 1958 film A Night to Remember. This "fact", however, is greatly overstated as the only shots used by the 1958 film are four brief inserts. Two shots are of the ship sailing in calm waters during the day—a very noticeable goof, since the model used in the 1943 version is very different from the one used in 1958. The other two shots were brief clips of a flooding walkway in the engine room. No shots of the actual sinking were used in A Night to Remember.[3]

Allegations about Titanic

Several commentators[4] have expressed their conviction that James Cameron must have been very familiar with the 1943 Nazi propaganda film when writing and filming his own Titanic.

Several story aspects are in both films but not in any other Titanic version:

  • A group of first class passengers is taken on a tour of the ship; both films imply their tour would head to the engine room, a location forbidden to passengers under all circumstance in reality.
  • The salt of the earth non-British "hero" orders his girlfriend into a lifeboat. She hesitantly complies and watches her lover disappear behind the railing as the lifeboat is lowered (though she does not jump out in the 1943 film.)
  • A young, dashing male lead coaches the girl he loves that she should not marry the man for whom she feels nothing - just because her parents ordered her to do so.
  • A stolen jewelry subplot (a character is accused of a jewel theft (including a blue diamond) he did not commit).
  • A First Class couple fight in their stateroom over the woman's alleged infidelity, only to have a Steward interrupt their squabble and order them to put on lifebelts and proceed to the boat deck.
  • A scene of a character being informed by another character of the ship sinking while both are standing on the grand staircase as people are rushing up the stairs is used in both films, as well as in A Night to Remember.
  • One of the characters ends up in the ship's jail as it floods, while another one (male in the 1943 film) has to rescue him with an emergency axe. (This was based on an actual incident that occurred during the sinking.)

Additionally, many of the scene compositions and camera angles are similar to the 1943 film.

See also

References

  1. ^ Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p71 ISBN 0-9627613-1-1
  2. ^ a b Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich p69 ISBN 0-9627613-1-1
  3. ^ "A Night to Remember trivia". IMDb. Retrieved 2010-12-01.
  4. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20070928065833/www.riefenstahl.org/director/1954/dassanowsky-titanic.html

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