James Cameron’s *Titanic *appeared in 1997 as the most expensive film ever made.
Werner Klingler and Herbert Selpin’s Titanic appeared in 1943 as the most expensive German film ever made. And the two share even more than their budgets’ record-breaking status, their famously “unsinkable” subject, and their title in common: both endured troubled productions, both feature a late scene where their male hero convinces his lover to just get on a lifeboat already, and both set out to make strong statements indeed. The later, American *Titanic *has much to say about the cinematic triumph of late-20th-century visual effects, whereas the earlier, German *Titanic *takes a more negative tack, mounting an indictment of the supposedly savage avarice and thorough corruption of that country’s bitter wartime enemy, Great Britain. In its ill-fated titular ship, the huge-scale propaganda film found what must have seemed like the perfectly opulent illustration of its argument.
