Titanic (1943)
1h 28m | PG-13
In 1912, the Titanic embarks on its inevitable collision course with history. In the wake of the over-spending required to build the largest luxury ship in the world, White Star Line executive Sir Bruce Ismay schemes to reverse the direction of his company's plummeting stock value. Onboard the Titanic, brave German 1st Officer Petersen struggles to convince his self-important British superiors not to overexert the ship's engines.
Director: Werner Klingler
Studio: Tobis Filmkunst
Genre: Drama, History
Video: 720p
Cast
Sybille Schmitz
as Sigrid Olinsky
Hans Nielsen
as Offizier Petersen
Kirsten Heiberg
as Gloria
Karl Schönböck
as John Jacob Astor
Otto Wernicke
as Kapitän Edward J. Smith
Franz Schafheitlin
as Hunderson
Reviews
Right from the beginning, it's quite hard to take this too seriously. A group of investors gather only to realise that the White Star Line is quite literally running on fumes. Their stock is falling through the floor due to the extravagances of the spend on the RMS Titanic and it's chairman "Ismay" (Ernest Fritz Fürbringer) decides that they will have to find the ship's wealthiest clients and try to coax them into reversing this decline. Then to sea and the film becomes a standard series of maritime melodramas with loads of treachery, adultery and for many the impending iceberg may well have been welcome! The concluding scenes are actually quite tensely handled by Herbert Selpin but the exaggerated characterisations and clearly expressed anti-British sentiment, as well as scant attention to the known facts - even in 1943 - render the thing little better than a piece of clumsy propaganda that played a bit fast and loose with some real historical figures. The only thing that was really missing was an assertion that the iceberg was just a craftily disguised U-boat! It's worth a watch, though - at times the philosophies of venality and cowardice from some aboard might be nearer the mark than we'd care to admit.