Discover
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Herbert Selpin
Director -
Friedl Behn-Grund
Director of Photography -
Walter Zerlett-Olfenius
Writer -
Fritz Maurischat
Production Design -
Werner Klingler
Director -
Werner Eisbrenner
Original Music Composer -
Willy Reiber
Producer -
Friedel Buckow
Editor
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CinemaSerf 4/24/2024 4:29:45 PM
Right from the beginning, it's quite hard to take this too seriously. A group of investors gather only to realise that the White Star Line is quite literally running on fumes. Their stock is falling through the floor due to the extravagances of the spend on the RMS Titanic and it's chairman "Ismay" (Ernest Fritz Fürbringer) decides that they will have to find the ship's wealthiest clients and try to coax them into reversing this decline. Then to sea and the film becomes a standard series of maritime melodramas with loads of treachery, adultery and for many the impending iceberg may well have been welcome! The concluding scenes are actually quite tensely handled by Herbert Selpin but the exaggerated characterisations and clearly expressed anti-British sentiment, as well as scant attention to the known facts - even in 1943 - render the thing little better than a piece of clumsy propaganda that played a bit fast and loose with some real historical figures. The only thing that was really missing was an assertion that the iceberg was just a craftily disguised U-boat! It's worth a watch, though - at times the philosophies of venality and cowardice from some aboard might be nearer the mark than we'd care to admit.
Karl Schönböck
John Jacob AstorSybille Schmitz
Sigrid OlinskyErnst Fritz Fürbringer
Sir Joseph Bruce IsmayOtto Wernicke
Kapitän Edward J. SmithSepp Rist
JanFranz Schafheitlin
HundersonFritz Genschow
Theodor Loos