Titanic

Movie Information

The Hendersonville Film Society will show Titanic at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 31, in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community (behind Epic Cinemas), 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville.
Score:

Genre: Disaster Drama With Propaganda Trimmings
Director: Herbert Selpin
Starring: Sybille Schmitz, Hans Nielsen, Kirsten Heiberg, E.F. Fürbringer, Karl Schönböck
Rated: NR

No, this isn’t James Cameron’s 1997 film, nor is it Jean Negulesco’s 1953 one. This is the 1943 German version of Titanic, an intriguing artifact of Nazi filmmaking that manages to suggest that all this could have been avoided had the powers that be only listened to the one—you guessed it—German officer on the ship. As filmmaking, it’s not much to get excited about, but as a curio, it’s something else again.

The Nazi film industry—controlled by Hitler’s minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels—was a carefully controlled affair, but one that sought to make its obviously propaganda-laden product a popular one as well, and for that matter an exportable one. As a result, many of the films it produced were fairly careful not to be too overt in the depiction of the glories of the fatherland. (Dull, tedious and clunky as their 1943 all-color fantasy Munchhausen might be, it’s only mildly effective in terms of propaganda—except for the failed attempt at showing how great the German film industry was.) Titanic, however, is one of their less subtle efforts.

Not only is the film saddled with a fictional German officer who could have prevented the disaster, but the disaster itself is no longer pinned on the arrogance of the directors of the White Star line and their “unsinkable ship,” but is turned into a critique of capitalism and its greed and desire to make a buck off the proletariat. That this is awfully close to Soviet propaganda seems to have escaped their notice—just as it escapes their notice that the head Nazis were themselves in the realm of greedy capitalism.

Of course, the real issue with any film of this nature is how effectively it works as spectacle, and Titanic is simply not much of a spectacle. Even at a brisk 85 minutes, the film is half over before the ship hits the iceberg—most of that time given over to ersatz Hollywood romance and watching the greedy capitalists bring all this to the disaster point. Even when this happens, there’s not much there other than some barely passable model work, which has to make way for more “I told you so” posturing by the impossibly stoic German officer. All of this makes for a fascinating—and very skewed—take on the story, but it doesn’t do much in the way of drama.

There was much grimmer drama behind the scenes of the production. Director Herbert Selpin unwisely criticized the script and a few other things, which resulted in his arrest by the gestapo before the film was finished. He was found hanged in his cell the next morning. Even after production resumed with a tamer director at the helm, it proved to be all for nothing. By the time the film was ready to be unveiled, the Reich was coming apart at the seams and it was decided that it just wasn’t the best time to treat the German public to scenes of mass death and destruction. As a result, Titanic was never released in Hitler’s Germany.

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About Ken Hanke
Head film critic for Mountain Xpress from December 2000 until his death in June 2016. Author of books "Ken Russell's Films," "Charlie Chan at the Movies," "A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series," "Tim Burton: An Unauthorized Biography of the Filmmaker."

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6 thoughts on “Titanic

  1. “Titanic I thought was the most dreadful piece of work I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” – Robert Altman, not referring to the film reviewed above.

  2. Ken Hanke

    You realize, Steve, you’re in the minority on Nashville? I’m not overwhelmingly fond of Nashville, but compared to the Cameron Titanic it starts looking like the greatest movie ever made.

  3. Chip Kaufmann

    No one got out much this weekend so the screening of TITANIC was canceled probably to be rescheduled in March along with the pre-feature screening of the 1943 German cartoon SNOWMAN IN JULY (an old favorite of persons native to this area).

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