★★
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 1st
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 20th
century cruise ship than any feature I’ve seen that’s ten times as long. And it’s more interesting than this feature.
