Trivia / Titanic (1943)

• All-Star Cast: At least as far as Nazi Germany was concerned. This film was supposed to be the German answer to Grand Hotel, featuring some of their biggest box office stars of the 1930s and 40s. Ultimately subverted because the film wasn't released in Germany until after the war; when most of its lead actors have either ended up as war casualties, were forbidden to act under the Allies, or simply lost their earlier star power.
• Bad Export for You: The uncut 85 minute version has not been available in Europe for decades. Only the censored 80 minute edition has been released on home video until the full 85 minute version was finally released on Blu-ray in Germany in 2019, 14 years after being made readily available in North America. The film is yet to have an official release in the United Kingdom.
• Banned in China: By the time the film was completed, the tide of war had turned against the Third Reich as German cities were being obliterated by the merciless Allied air raids. Immediately after screening a pre-release print of the film, Joseph Goebbels realized that a movie portraying an impending wipe-out of a panicking crowd would do little to help the morale of desperate German civilians, who were gradually starting to see the writing on the wall. Titanic wasn't screened in Germany until 1949, when the Allies allowed a censored print to be released in certain parts of West Germany. The uncut version has not been released on home video in Germany until its Blu-ray debut in 2019 and the film has not been officially released in the United Kingdom outside of a few niche film festival screenings.
• Creator Killer: Literally.
  • Herbert Selpin, the original director, made disparaging comments about the Kriegsmarine and was hauled off by the Gestapo. He was found hanged in his cell the next day.
  • Karl Dannemann, who played the heroic wireless operator Jack Phillips, shot himself in the head on May 4, 1945 in order to avoid capture by the Red Army, who had stormed Berlin two days prior.
• Distanced from Current Events: By 1943, to everyone’s surprise, Germany began losing the war and its civilians found themselves not much better off than the passengers and crew trapped aboard the foundering Titanic, so Goebbels decided to withdraw the film indefinitely.
• Fake Brit: Nearly the entire cast.
• Fake Russian: German actress Sybille Schmitz portrays a Russian Countess.
• The Production Curse: As detailed below, the film's production caused nothing but death, disgrace, betrayal, and tragedy.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • While the film spent decades languishing in obscurity and was largely unavailable on home video before 2005, rumors spread on the internet that this was the first Titanic movie to show the ship splitting in half before the final plunge, but no such scene was ever shot. The film always portrayed Titanic going down in one piece, just like all the other dramatizations of the sinking before the wreck was discovered in 1985. The first Titanic movie to ever show the ship breaking in half was the 1996 television miniseries.
  • It has become Common Knowledge that this 1943 Nazi Propaganda film portrays Bruce Ismay as an "evil Jewish businessman." This has been mentioned in various reviews of the film and was even cited in some books, but Bruce Ismay's religious affiliation and ethnicity are never mentioned at any point at the film, other than playing up the stereotypical Evil Brit angle. In fact, the film lacks any antisemitic content due to being first and foremost a work of anti-British propaganda.
• Prop Recycling: The ship miniature model appears early in the film as Titanic's builder's model.
• Troubled Production: Probably one of the worst examples.
  • The shooting was interrupted by bombings and air raids, the director was arrested by the Gestapo and "committed suicide" in his cell, while the Cap Arcona, a large German ocean liner that was used as a stand-in for the Titanic ended up sharing the same fate when it was destroyed by the RAF in 1945 while being used as a death ship by the Nazis, killing over 5,000 concentration camp inmates; bones of the victims kept washing up on the beach near the wreck for decades afterwards. The film itself was banned, and after the war it was plundered mercilessly for stock footage by the victorious Allies.
  • And even worse (or better, from the Allied perspective) the production may well have aided the Allied war effort. Goebbels was the only one of the top Nazi leadership who had not been in uniform during World War I, and he was desperate to prove his own worth in the regime out of feelings of inferiority. This resulted in Goebbels being extremely free with budgeting and other aspects of the production (adjusted to inflation, the film was only slightly less expensive than the James Cameron version) to ensure a propaganda masterpiece that would establish him as indispensable to the war effort. Goebbels also ordered mandatory blackout rules bent for Selpin after he requested being allowed to film night scenes at, well, night. In middle of 1942. On a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. Goebbels also pulled vast amounts of military personnel off the lines to serve as extras — causing there to be drunken, out of control Wehrmacht and Waffen SS troops interfering with shooting (this directly caused Selpin's fatal outburst, as he was not amused by the antics). And then the movie was banned in Germany anyway when Joseph Goebbels realized that a film about a desperate group of people dying horribly in a helpless situation hit way too close to home in the German cities being pounded by Allied bombing raids.
• You Look Familiar: Theodor Loos, who portrays Professor Bergmann, also played a pastor in Atlantik, another German language film based on the Titanic disaster from 1929.

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