TITANIC (1943)

Before Leonardo and Kate braved the disaster, even before Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck did the same, there was this German-made film which, while lacking a romantic couple at its center, and lacking even any fully-rounded characters, manages to be interesting from a propaganda viewpoint. In this version, made in the middle of WWII, the tragic tale of the sinking of the biggest ship in the world isn't a story of overarching pride but of English greed. In contrast to the more familiar versions of this story, this film has one main villain: Bruce Ismay, head of the White Star shipping line. His attempt to break speed records from England to New York comes not out of some amorphous desire to get in the history books, but out of a concrete attempt to raise the prices of stock shares in the company. Other American and British capitalists, such as John Jacob Astor, are fellow bad guys with no redeeming qualities. There are a couple of romances, or more precisely, a romance and a half, presented as subplots. The main one involves a member of the ship's band and a young woman who works as a maid on the ship. The half-romance involves a rich Russian countess (Sybille Schmitz) who is being coldly courted, for her money alone, by Ismay, but who discovers during the voyage that she's broke. She runs into Peterson (Hans Nielsen), the only German officer among the seamen (and therefore the only unambiguously good guy in the movie), a man with whom she had some kind of relationship in the past. He is the only crew member to register a complaint about the ship speeding through potentially dangerous drift ice (the point is made that the captain, who technically had the authority to do as he liked, had reservations but ultimately gave in to greedy Ismay's wishes), and his selfless example on board inspires Schmitz to behave in a noble fashion as the ship sinks. As in the James Cameron film, the class split between the rich (upper decks) and the poor (below, in steerage), is highlighted (both using folk dancing). The scenes of the ship sinking are serviceable for the era in which the film was produced, but some of the effects are awfully slopp--the line between the foreground, with the passengers in lifeboats, and the background, with the ship sinking, is visible and quite shaky. The finale is a brief scene in a courtroom where Ismay is on trial for negligence; despite Peterson's testimony, the responsibility for the disaster is placed on the (dead) captain, leading to a final crawl on screen which states that "the death of 1500 people remains unatoned, an eternal condemnation of England's quest for profit." Supposedly, some of the footage of the sinking was re-used in the 1958 A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. Interesting, if largely uninvolving. [TCM]