Titanic

Titanic (1943)

Timing: 1:25 (85 min)

6.144/10
73

6.256/10
510

6.1/10
2000

All about film

Video 1

Photo 6

Actors and characters

Release date

1943-11-10

Country

Germany

Production

Tobis Filmkunst

Genre

Action, Drama, History

Budget

$4 000 000

Revenue

$0

Website

Director

Werner Klingler, Herbert Selpin

Actors

Sybille Schmitz, Hans Nielsen, Kirsten Heiberg, Karl Schönböck, Otto Wernicke, Franz Schafheitlin, Ernst Fritz Fürbringer, Sepp Rist
All actors and roles (8)

Scenario

Herbert Selpin, Walter Zerlett-Olfenius

Producer

Willy Reiber

Operator

Friedl Behn-Grund

Composer

Werner Eisbrenner

Artist

Audition

Editing

Friedel Buckow
All team (8)

• The film was commissioned by the Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, who wanted to demonstrate the incompetence of Great Britain.
• The film's director, Herbert Zelpin, was extremely dissatisfied with the script and voiced harsh criticism of the film's creators in particular and the fascist regime in general. On July 31, 1942, Zelpin was arrested by the Gestapo, and on August 1, he hanged himself in his own cell. Whether this was suicide or murder remains unknown to this day. Another director completed the film. After the war, the film was banned and was not shown until the mid-1950s.
• Most of the film was shot in the German-occupied Polish port of Gdynia, on the Baltic Sea coast. The passenger liner SS Cap Arcona served as the Titanic. On May 3, 1945, after a raid by the Royal Air Force, the ship also sank. The losses on the liner were more than three times the number of victims on the actual Titanic.
• Walter Zerlett-Olfenius, his close friend and co-writer, denounced the film's director to the Gestapo.
• In 1943, the film was shown only in certain European cities occupied by the Germans, such as Paris and Prague, but was banned by Joseph Goebbels from release in Germany for moral reasons. Shortly after the war, the film was shown in all countries of the Eastern Bloc as a trophy film, including in Russian. In Germany itself, the fully restored film was released on DVD for the first time, uncensored, only in 2005.