James Lileks stumbles over the 1943 movie version of Titanic:

Did I get the British version? No, that’s “A Night to Remember.” I checked the TiVo info: this was “Titanic” from 1943. What? Robert Osbourne ambled up to the camera and explained:

This was the Nazi version of the tale.

I’d never heard of it. (Of course, there are ten reviews on imdb.com.) It was a fairly big-budget item for the German cinema, what with the war and all, and had two directors. The first was killed by the Gestapo midway through production. Must have been hell to arrange a competition bond in those days. Goebbels nixed its release in the end, since so many people dying was apparently a depressing thing to show war-weary audiences. They wanted music, romance, comedy. They got it, but from the clips I’ve seen they were fascinatingly soulless things – everyone seems to be smiling through sheer terror. Imagine a Busby Berkeley sequence in which every dancer has her own sniper in the wings waiting to shoot her if she fails, and you’ll get the idea.

The Nazi “Titanic” is useful evidence against those who think the National Socialists chose the second part of their name for no particular reason – it’s anti-capitalist propaganda. The movie begins not on the dock, or on board, or in a boisterous café by the quay; no, it starts off in the White Star boardroom, where the eeeevil investors are figuring out the best way to manipulate the stock. Yes, that’s correct: insider trading sunk the Titanic. The head of White Star – a tall, dashing, cynical, cunning, selfish Bruce Ismay (snort) pushes the captain to reach New York in record speed to boost the stock, which had gyrated up and down prior to departure, and had been subject to large block purchases by other characters on the ship – oh, don’t ask. The interiors looks nothing like the Titanic, but the special effects aren’t bad, and it’s impressively shot. It’s just all wrong. Every frame is just saturated with a strong dose of Wrong.

Forgot the best part: the hero is a German. He’s a fictional officer who tries to warn everyone about the ice. He’s cool, composed, devoted to duty, and scornful of the capitalists. At least the Soviets had that Russian-soulfulness thing going, so their movies would be soaked with sloppy emotion and Slavic hymns; the Nazis were tin-eared thick-thumbed boors when it came to art. God help us if they’d won; I cannot imagine their sitcoms.