August 26: Titanic (1943 -- Herbert Selpin & Werner Klingler)

★★

This is one of the most interesting bad movies I’ve seen.  It’s all over the place.  It has some elements of Eisenstein in it, like the scenes looking up from the engine room with people running along various walkways.  Those shots could have been lifted from the early part of Potemkin.  And though it was made in 1943, Titanic has a lot of silent movie conventions.  There are the overdone poses, like that of Sigrid as her lifeboat is lowered, and mannered gestures, like that of the telegraph operator leaving his hand lingering in the air after shaking hands with his mate for the last time.  And there are ample close-ups and melodrama as the tale unfolds.  At one point, the camera homes in on a virtuous German couple in steerage who are soon separated in the chaos but happily reunited at the film’s concluding inquest, the woman’s hair still braided and in a circle on her head.  Titanic veers radically from action to sentimentality to drama to realism, and while Selpin/Klingler wrap up a few of the story lines, we don’t ever find out what happens to some of the characters we follow.  This Titanic is a disorganized mess.

But bad as this film is, there are some elements that make it worthwhile.  More familiar with the British 1958 and Cameron 1997 versions of the Titanic story, I was surprised that Selpin/Klingler could take this story of disaster and loss and turn it into a stark, anti-capitalist statement that reminded me that the second part of “Nazi” is “sozialismus.”  Aside from the virtuous German First Officer Peterson, you don’t feel any sympathy at all for the cast of selfish, manipulative, greedy passengers in 1^st class.  They constantly conspire against each other, and in fact, it is their desire to manipulate stock prices that makes them push the ship to dangerous speeds and disaster.  When the ship sinks, this gaggle of reprobates mostly get their comeuppance.  It’s interesting to see a Titanic where you don’t care if the characters survive or not.  It's an original approach to the story.

I watched this film with Lou as one of our movie nights, and while we agreed it wasn’t very good, we both liked the short film that Kino included on the DVD about Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic.  This little promo film tells more about life on an early 20^th century cruise ship than any feature I’ve seen that’s ten times as long.   And it’s more interesting than this feature.