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YMMV / Titanic (1943)

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  • Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Ironically given the film's intended purpose as Nazi propaganda, it's just as easy to interpret it as an anti-Nazi film. Specifically, it has been noted that the film can also be seen as an allegory to a righteous German citizen defiantly standing up to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, who were recklessly "sailing" Germany into disaster with their egomania, war mongering, and genocidal agenda. Given that director Herbert Selpin was arrested and probably murdered for loudly criticizing the German war effort, it's possible that he may have subconsciously incorporated his own views on the Nazi regime into the film.
  • Common Knowledge: It has been repeatedly stated online, even by people who have claimed to have seen the film, that the main storyline concerns "a group of Wall Street Jews" who cause the Titanic disaster with their "greed." Anyone who has actually seen the film would know that there are absolutely no references to Jews or Judaism at any point in the film and since the movie's main theme is criticism of British capitalism, the American Wall Street does not figure into the plot either.
  • Designated Love Interest: Sigrid Olinsky seems to exist solely to provide Officer Petersen with something else to do besides constantly chastising Ismay.
  • Fan Nickname: As you can imagine, Nazi Titanic. ("Fan" may be the wrong word, however.)
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The SS Cap Arcona, which was used as a stand-in for the Titanic, in the end shared the same fate. In 1945, the ship was transporting over 5,000 concentration camp inmates and was bombed by the Royal Air Force, killing almost everyone on board. It was all a plan organized by the Nazis to help get rid of war crime witnesses, in which the Allies found themselves to be unwilling participants. Bones kept washing up on the beach near the wreck for decades afterwards.
    • The Cap Arcona wasn't the only ship to sink in 1945 with thousands aboard. Several ships that were packed with thousands of German people fleeing the Soviet advance in East Prussia sank, due to Soviet submarine attacks. The biggest tragedy of them all - indeed, the worst maritime disaster of all time - was the Wilhelm Gustloff, with up to 9000 refugees, Kriegsmarine personnel and wounded soldiers dying in the frozen waters of the Baltic sea. Every one of these tragedies dwarfed the RMS Titanic one in numbers. One of the survivors of the Gustloff was Eric Braeden, who would later play John Jacob Astor in James Cameron's Titanic.
    • Sybille Schmitz, who portrayed the female lead, was blacklisted and shunned by the German film industry after the war and then possibly murdered by her own doctor. Her tragic final years were the inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s penultimate film Veronika Voss. Schmitz’s presence in the film only compounds its deathly sense of dread.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • The fictional German first officer's name is Petersen. Sixty-three years later, a director of the same name and nationality would helm a flick about a similarly doomed ocean liner.
    • For as much as the film in general is a blatantly inaccurate propaganda piece, it actually offers perhaps the most accurate depiction of J. Bruce Ismay's survival of all the major Titanic-related films to date, with Ismay being shepherded aboard a lifeboat by the first officer so that he could appear before the ensuing board of inquiry. While the first officer in question is entirely fictional, and his motives aren't quite the same as those of his real-life counterpart (William Murdoch, who simply felt it was important that Ismay survive to testify given his seniority at White Star Line and the fact that he witnessed the sinking first-hand; Petersen by contrast wants to ensure Ismay is punished for his part in the sinking), it's still a damn sight more accurate than most subsequent adaptations, where Ismay is simply a Dirty Coward who steps aboard a lifeboat of his own accord in front of crowds of other passengers.
  • Narm It seems the perruquier at Tobis Films must have had it in for Sybille Schmitz.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Henderson is played by Franz Schafheitlin, later known as Sir Arthur.
  • Special Effects Failure: While most of the special effects are very advanced for the time period, the scale of the Titanic miniature is seriously off, especially in closer shots.

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