Bittersweet Infamy - #121 - Nazi Titanic (and Other Films in Which Ships Sink)

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

As part of our Titanic April series, Taylor tells Josie and guest host Mitchell Collins about the film adaptations of the Titanic story, including Saved from the Titanic, the lost 1912 film that starred an actual survivor, and 1943's Titanic, the Nazi propaganda flick whose turbulent production was connected to an even more deadly maritime tragedy. Plus: was world-famous boxer Jack Johnson really turned away from the Titanic because of the colour of his skin?

Welcome to bittersweet infamy, Titanic April. New stories about the Titanic every week in April. From the maiden voyage where the unsinkable did the unthinkable. To the echoes of infamy that ripple across history's surface in its wake. All aboard. Welcome back to Bitter Sweet Infamy, Titanic April. I'm here with Josie Mitchell.

Yep. And fresh up from Stoke in those boilers. It's our boy special guest, Mitchell Collins. Hi, it's nice to be up here for a little while until you'll send me back down. Yeah, you needed a break. Fresh Sierra.

You needed a break. I don't typically rub elbows with folks like y'all. Well, you saved my daughter from falling off the front of the Titanic, right? So you can dine with us tonight. Okay. Whoa. Okay, thanks.

That friends is an allusion to James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, which is apt. Not only because Mitchell is our perpetual special guest at the film club where we will be discussing that film over at coffeek-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy, but in general today, we're just gonna be talking a little bit about the film versions

of the Titanic. The film. And there are many. I had no idea. I have a question, Taylor. I love questions. Are you going to be telling us one big crazy story of a particular one or are we going to hear about a lot of the different ones?

Fucking both. Fucking both. Hell yeah. Fuck yeah. Yes. I can't even believe it. Sorry I asked. You got, I'll give you the flyover version of the film history of the Titanic.

The seagull's view. Yeah, you got it. And I should say that for those of you who are wanting the, wait, what is, Taylor, Josie, special guest Mitchell Collins, what is the Titanic? You should go back and check out episode 120, which is the first episode of our Titanic April series.

And that is where Josie basically covers everything from the raising to the sinking of the RMS Titanic, one of the most infamous maritime disasters in history. I just listened to it. I just listened to it today while I worked and just spent riveting. It was haunting. It's actually a little creepy.

Is that a rivet pun? Because there are rivets in the Titanic? If only the real Titanic was riveted. As strongly as, wow, thank you, that's a hell of an endorsement. Did you learn anything from that episode that you didn't already know about this tragedy? Yes. In fact, one of the things I learned that set me off on, I was like researching after is you were talking about like iceberg crashes prior to that. And I was reading that like, there was a ton,

like there was a ton of boats that crashed into icebergs like right before the Titanic. And it was just a thing. I don't know. It's weird. It's just a common early turn of the century. It wasn't like a new thing. It was like people were just like, yeah. We crashed into another iceberg.

Arrogance, arrogance about icebergs. There's this overarching thought of human arrogance. But if you like file it down to the tip of the iceberg, really, it is arrogance about icebergs. Yeah. People keep crashing into them. Mm hmm. I learned so much from that episode. I was fascinated by this Ismay guy you were talking about. Oh yeah. Ismay. Interesting character. And we'll talk a lot about him on today's show.

Not to, you know, get into the weeds of what you already talked about, but I also kind of don't judge him for jumping on that boat, but I kind of judge him for everything else. But like in that moment of like, do I survive or not? Like, it's hard to say. We've got all kinds of character archetypes to explore today, including that of the sort of quote unquote evil president of the white star line, J. Bruce Ismay. Let me finish up my iceberg metaphor that was in the middle of making though. So we've got this flyover history of the film world of Titanic, which will be the tip of our iceberg, but then sort of underneath that. Yes, I do have a big weird fuck you story to bring to you.

Whoa. Yeah. I'm really enjoying that metaphor. Actually, that's really nice. You didn't think about doing the iceberg metaphor, huh? You know, I guess not. Didn't occur to you. No, no, uh-uh. Well, we're on the subject of icebergs, actually, I saw, cause no one ever thinks to interrogate the history. The iceberg? Yes, no one thinks to ask

where did this iceberg come from? Greenland. It was Greenland, bitch, it was Greenland. Okay, talk about this, Josie. So you found the same, give us the E--Choo Hollywood story about the fucking iceberg, huh? What I remember from my research is that

it was most likely came from the ice shelf off of Greenland. And it was probably, gosh, how old, Taylor? Like 4,000 years old or something absurd. Yeah, like really insanely old. This particular iceberg. Yes, like dwarves the Titanic in like cosmic significance timeline wise.

Geological time. Yeah. Yes. And boats that went back to that site after the crash did see an iceberg that had like red paint sprayed along it. Whoa. Which is very eerie metaphorically, right? The blood of the passengers writ large in the form of the red paint

from the outside of the ship. Yeah, it wasn't blood, it was paint. But I know metaphoric. I said metaphorical metaphor. These Josie, our listeners are so intelligent. They know what we're talking about. But the way you characterize it in the story in your last episode is so haunting because you said that the water was like glass and that it was a moonless night.

And I'm imagining this big tanker of a steamer, the biggest ship ever built, is there one minute making all this noise. And then the next minute all that's left is this red streak of paint on the iceberg. That's so fucked. Just slides into the glassy surface, kind of elegantly. I think one of Josie's like eyewitness accounts

put it as like, there was kind of like an elegance to the way that it just kind of glided into the ocean. Crazy. So rough. One thing that I alluded to earlier that Josie Mitchell and I regularly do once a month we do this is we meet for the bittersweet film club and we take these suggestions, usually we take the suggestions of our subscribers, though this month I should say we are going to be doing James Cameron's Titanic, because we'd be silly not to, wouldn't we? It's true.

Especially for our generation, I feel like. We grew up at just the time to want to watch this movie but not be allowed to because of the boobs. Because of the boobs. Because of the boobs and because they were on the back of a car. And we all saw it. We all found a way. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We found a way to see it.

We watched it just recently and we're excited to talk about it with you over at the Bittersweet Film Club. If you go to coffee.com. Josie, what's that URL? That's K.O. dash F.I. dot com slash bittersweet infamy. Very well done. But first, Mitchell, you look like you've got something to say, do you? I hope so. Let's find out like you've got something to say, do you? I hope so. Let's find out. I've got something to say. Do you have a minfamous for us to sort of warm up for the main story here about the Titanic?

What I brought for you today for the minfamous is related to movies. Okay. Because I think this is why I'm on this episode as a special guest of the movie club. Your professional movie buff. I'm a movie buff. And we must say actually just as a bit guest of the club. Yeah, you're a professional movie buff. I'm a movie buff. And we must say, actually, just as a bit of a callback, Mitchell is and I seldom mean this as a compliment, but this is the rare instance that I do mean this as a compliment.

Oh, God. Mitchell is something of the Steve Martin of bittersweet infamy. I hate it. It's not a compliment. Wait until you hear it. We know you hate Steve Martin. Detest him. Detest him from the fibers of my guts. But on Saturday Night Live, he's sort of well known for being a very frequent guest host. Like has among the most number of guest host spots and Mitchell has some a quiet streak. He's been on every season of Bitter Suit Infamy as a guest host. This is your season five appearance. Do you think it's because I'm married married to one of the hosts? I don't think that has anything to do with it.

Okay. Because you weren't when we started. So it can't be that. That's true. And in fact, when we started, this is all the way back in episode, I want to say 16, Mitchell covered Twilight Zone the movie. And as the infamous for that, we told a Titanic related story about how they all got

fucked up on PCP by getting dosed at one of the rap parties. I can't believe I forgot that. This is one of the craziest stories. Yes. And so one, go back and listen to that. And two, it sort of it ties us back into what you're about to express. We've sort of come full circle here. We have come full circle.

And that's why I kind of I'll start talking about movies at the beginning of this story as a way of getting into yours. Maybe. Sure. I have a feeling you're going to be talking about this movie the beginning of this story as a way of getting into yours, maybe. Sure. I have a feeling you're going to be talking about this movie, the very first Titanic movie. It was called Saved from the Titanic from 1912. And I'll let you tell people about that. My pleasure. I mean, listen, we can make it a little co-production when the time comes.

Something I know about this movie is it sort of had before Birth of a Nation took America, you know, by storm, if you will, and like got people interested in seeing a particular movie in mass, like this big event. Like Blockbuster. Saved by the Titanic had a similar effect as did a lot of the movies of this era where it's something that's kind of purient and it's right off the headlines, if you will. And this was common at this time. It's not that different than the times we're living in.

It's like this new media that's offering a chance to see celebrities or see this real thing that happened. And so I'm going to tell you guys about a movie that came out in 1910 that has something in common with that one. A couple years before Titanic is where I'm starting my little infamous. So in 1910, a big cinema event that happened is everybody watched the funeral of the King of England. This was like a huge new spectacle.

This idea that you could watch the King's funeral. People went to the movies just to see that. I bet that killed. I bet they were going in their suits like those kids at Minions. Exactly. Honestly, they did. Goggles and overalls and all. A lot of the fiction movies people went to see in 1910 were like remakes and sequels. People were seeing Cleopatra 1, Cleopatra 2, Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare adaptations,

Bible, you know, that's what people like. I remember my first YouTube video. I was like, what? But that's kind of what we're working with at Circa 1910. But the biggest cinema event of the year, probably the biggest American pop culture event of 1910, it's the documentary sports live footage of the heavyweight championship fight between Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson, which captivated America way in advance

to this huge hyped fight because of what it represented. So Jack Johnson, boxer from Galveston, Texas, survived the great hurricane. Galveston gets a lot of play on this show. We're always fucking talking from Galveston, Texas, survived the Great Hurricane. Galveston gets a lot of play on this show. We're always fucking talking about Galveston. Galveston's haunted, bitch. It's true. That's why. So one of the biggest natural disasters in human history, the big storm in Galveston 1900, Jack Johnson survives this storm with his family,

helps his family move out of this house, experiences extreme poverty in the aftermath of the storm and eventually leaves his family, helps his family move out of this house, experiences extreme poverty in the aftermath of the storm and eventually leaves his family, leaves home to become a boxer. And he goes by the nickname of the Galveston Giant. And he ends up being one of the most prominent and formidable boxers in America very quickly. And where people said that maybe no one could beat him, there becomes this big legend of perhaps there's a great white hope that could beat this huge black behemoth, Jack Johnson. Nothing changes. Nothing changes.

And so the true story goes that eventually Jim Jefferies was the decided great white hope that Jim Jefferies would have no problem. Our M&M. Exactly. This guy, M&M is going to come in and beat Jack Johnson and it's going to happen in Reno and it's going to happen on this date. So in kind of an unprecedented fashion, one of the major movie houses,

they hired an unprecedented amount of cameramen for a single event like this, nine cameras to capture this one fight and to get it in theaters in front of people's eyeballs as soon as possible, as live as we could have happened. Nine cameras was pretty plush back then I'm gathering. That was like- There's only four sides of the boxing ring.

We could put that in 3D, baby. So they do this and, you know, he wins. He beats Jim Jefferies, becoming the very first black heavyweight champion. He becomes the most famous person in America, probably the most famous black person ever in America. Wow. And the richest. And the aftermath of this, especially in regards to this movie, is that everybody sees the movie and then there's race riots all over the country when they finally see proof that this man has won.

God forbid a black guy succeed. Yeah. Certainly at the expense of the great white hope. Right. So because of this, like this movie is a major smash in like in the ways that we will soon see with other movies in the 1910s where everyone saw it and everyone saw that proof that he won and it kind of creates this problem for him where now it's a Britney Spears effect. He's famous and he's considered the best at what he does but everybody's got a problem with everything he seems to do. His taste is too flashy, his game is too hard, He likes fancy cars and hotels and he likes

white women and people really don't like that. We love when white guys love flashy cars and white women. Yeah. You know? Theodore Roosevelt, who's the president at the time, kind of like denounces the film version of this fight and says, you know, maybe this isn't such a good idea, boxing, you know, having people watch it. It's at least a gambling, at least a bad behavior. So he bans the filming of fights until 1940. What a wank. And this becomes kind of like, I don't know how to describe it other than like, I mentioned Britney Spears. Jack Johnson leading up to the seeking of the Titanic is a regular character in American cultural media, in American pop culture.

He's kind of a punching bag of, did you hear about this scandal? He tried to open a restaurant, didn't hear it went too well. He's dating another woman now, another divorce for Jack Johnson. He's getting kicked out of establishments where he's easily the richest person there, but still having to play by rules, different other than other people.

Once the Titanic sinks, there's sort of this big story that gets developed that's not exactly true about Jack Johnson, which is that he booked himself a ticket or wanted to on the Titanic. Okay. And that he was turned away for being black, which is a very common thing that would have happened to Jack Johnson at that time.

Even though he has got a lot of clout, he's one of the most famous people in the world. We're going to turn him away from this because he's black and we can't have that. Now we're in Dallas, Texas, 1912. The Titanic has sunk. Lead Belly, famous American blues musician and folk artist, is playing in bars with his buddy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and he hears the news, the Titanic sinks.

He, well aware of this rumor, I'm sure, and all of that's happened to Jack Johnson in this story, he writes a little song, and it's called The Titanic, When the Great ship went down. And the words to this song go something like this. Jack Johnson wanted to get on board. Captain said, we don't haul no coal.

Fare thee well, Titanic, fare thee well. It was midnight on the sea. Band was playing nearer to God to thee. Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well. And then close to the end of the song, something that gets repeated a lot by Lead Belly and sort of helped to perpetuate this legend about Jack Johnson and the Titanic,

is he says, when Jack Johnson heard the awful shock, people said he did the Eagle Rock. The well, Titanic, fare thee well. What does it mean to do the Eagle Rock? It's a dance move, baby. He was dancing. He was dancing on their graves, kinda. Yeah, a little bit.

There's something about this song that caught on. I think that Jack Johnson ends up kind of working as a metaphor. It's not really important whether or not he almost got on the Titanic or not. Turns out he was in the States when she set sail. There was no chance that he could have been on it at all. But it makes for a good story. But it kind of speaks to this. Maybe sometimes this thing some of us feel

these days, this desire to be petty sometimes to say, you know what, I wasn't invited to this party, but party didn't go so well, did it? The party sank. Party sank. Yeah. Yeah, no, no, I get it. I get it. Interesting.

And sort of like an expression of I would assume Leadbelly is a black guy. Yes? Yes. So there's, there's that sort of expression of frustration with a highfalutin whiteness that keeps blackness out. Yeah, and I think using Jack Johnson as this character in the song, he's the most exceptional, the most high achieving

of his race of the time. It's Jim Crow South, and this man is a millionaire and the champion, and yet he's still not led into the upper echelon. And then this thing happens, this thing that's catastrophic. It's an opportunity to sort of point something out. There were a lot of black people on board the Titanic. But it also, you know, especially all the famous first class folks on the Titanic, they were conservative, more conservative.

So what they stood for and how they lived their lives and the worldview that they had was older. It was maybe more akin to like 1860s. Right. You're keeping a world alive from your parents or something. Yeah. Yeah. And we're all fantasizing about it was better before. Yeah. Even though of course like the Titanic was like this huge step of engineering progress, but not that big of a step in like social progress. And I'd argue not that big of a step in engineering progress, given what happened. Yeah, I did. Given what happened.

The sources that I pulled from are a lot bigger and have a lot of other stories and interesting things. Like there's this entire folk tale about this guy named Shine, a fictional mythological even black man named Shine, who was the last survivor of the Titanic and swim across the entire Atlantic Ocean to safety. Interesting. Too big for a infamous, I thought that one, but. Well, and the other layer of this is like there were plenty of other ships that went

down in the Atlantic, especially during the Atlantic slave trade. Oh my God. And it's kind of related to our conversation. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. To think that the Titanic gets immediately meme-ified, but none of that other history really does. Yeah, that's a very good point.

That's a very good point. Oh, another thing that maybe I should mention right now, when he played this and when he famously recorded it, he talks about how he played it in bars after the sinking of the Titanic and noticed that white audiences and black audiences responded to it differently. That he couldn't use some of those lines about doing the Eagle Rock, for instance, with the white audiences. They found it too distasteful. He wasn't allowed to make that kind of a... It's not so much a joke, but it's a little bit of a relief, you know? Let's hear the song. Okay, let's play it

Just Johnson want to get on board captain. He says I hold no code Just Johnson want to get on board captain he says I hold no code You're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts, offering host endorsements, or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email Bob at Libsyn.com to learn more.

That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N.com. I have been totally Titanic-pilled, body and soul. I think so, I think it's inevitable. Yeah. Yeah. It's inevitable. It's for you. Yeah. Like I think just as a diversion, just like, well, I guess for one month of my life,

I'll be intensely into Titanic and then never again. It presents itself appealingly, no? Yeah. Well, I've always been someone who disassociates and finds areas of research or whatever stupid hobbies. Yeah. Preach into the choir. Yeah. But the Titanic really pulls you in, no pun intended.

Does not let go, that suction. No, drags you under. Strong. Is Titanic the perfect dramatic story? As Irish literary critic, John Wilson Foster posits. Okay, okay. So it's not just me, I brought in reinforcements. Titanic herself with all her grandeur is the stage

and our players are various stock archetypes over and over again. Rich man, socialite, unsung hero, coward, martyr, deserter of post, stayer at post, poor immigrant, manifest hero, et cetera. To your point about the, is it the perfect story? I was thinking about that in my intro, talking about the movies of the 1910? I was thinking about that in my intro talking about

the movies of the 1910s how they loved a sequel. They love an adaptation of maybe one of the books of the Bible or Shakespeare and thinking about James Cameron's Titanic and other of the versions that I've seen and read about of the Titanic. I kind of see it in that tradition not necessarily that it's the ultimate but it has found its place as a very adaptable line of stories that show up again and again, that you can always return to the Titanic well, just like you might with Hamlet or something like that for your film adaptation. It feels like it's one of the stock stories in our culture now. This version of Titanic can be simplified and it has a lot of different morals and interpretations. Again, safety re-icebergs is the one that I've been pitching really hard. But the simplified morality play version is hubris meets an indifferent fate in the form of tragedy. Stephanie Barzewski,

a scholar of British history at Clemson University, says that the Ballad of the Titanic is, quote, at its heart a story that reminds us of our limitations. What human ingenuity can achieve and how easily that same ingenuity can fail in a brief random encounter with the forces of nature. It should be no surprise that a story is rich with symbolic meanings as this one has been put to film again and again and again. So let's do a little brief history of the film versions of the Titanic. Non-exhaustive because there are a lot of them. There are so many. So very many. So very many. One that I unfortunately couldn't watch because it's a lost film is the one that Mitchell was alluding to earlier, which was 1912's Saved from the Titanic. Not to be confused with Saved by the Bell.

Saved by the Bell or Saved St the Bell or Saved starring Mandy Moore. None of the above. Yeah, okay. None of the above folks. Called Saved from the Titanic. And you might have noted that date of premiere 1912. Yeah. As in like, holy fuck, didn't the Titanic go down in 1912?

Premiering in the United States just 31 days. Jesus. After the sinking of the Titanic, the 10 minute long silent film which starred an actual Titanic survivor was the earliest Dramatization of the tragedy. So, what do you know Mitchell? You were saying that this is something that you had kind of encountered It's a juicy story. Yeah, it's a very strange Juicy story where a lot of kind of bizarre things unfold. I know.

I mean, I don't want to tell any of it before you do, but I was interested in it in connection to my Mimphemus that I told just because it's this world of silent cinema that's, I guess, a lot more like TikTok or something today where it comes fast and cheap and we're not making great works of art necessarily. We're getting those eyeballs. We're getting those clicks, baby. Five cents a seat, baby, or whatever it was. That's probably a bit expensive.

And like a lot of the logic of the decisions being made was made in that spirit of not making art or getting awards, but just like getting eyeballs on this thing. We'll start with the sinking of the Titanic and in specific, 22 year old Dorothy Gibson, who's just this sort of general model actor, I would say she's been in

like a few ads as in like she sat for a sensitive pencil drawing of her face and they used it to sell hair products kind of ads, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like old school modeling where they drew you for magazines. She's doing that sort of thing and she's got a few acting gigs. She's on vacation in Europe with her mother when she gets recalled by her employer, the Eclair Film Company, to participate in a new production that they're launching. She happens to be up late playing a game of bridge in the first class saloon on the night of the sinking, which is credited in part with saving her life. Bridge. Bridge over troubled waters, right? They sing about these things. Dorothy Gibson ends up

as one of the 28 people aboard lifeboat number seven, which is the very first to be launched from the Sinking Titanic. Lucky number seven. Lucky number seven, and so it is, right? And she gets back there and she's having an affair with this guy, Jules Brulatour, who is a producer at the Eclair Film Company. And the second he kind of gets wind of what's happened on Titanic He sets up a bunch of cameras and gets some like kind of stuff that he can make a news reel out of and this News reel is a huge hit. That made me feel so insane to learn that he's dating her They're having an affair before it set off and launched They were already together in this affair and she's on the Titanic. Life is an Agatha Christie novel at the end of the day.

Honestly, and then he finds out that his mistress is on the Carpathia as one of the few survivors of this fucking historic sinking of the ship. And he, instead of being like, I have to go see her and see if she's okay. There's money here. He's like, there's a great opportunity for the future film that I'm already writing about

with her as the main character. Oh, it writes itself. And in fact, she wrote it. So there you go. Allegedly, he's sort of able to talk her into or she feels that this is an opportunity to kind of, you know, maybe purge some of this stuff, speak up on behalf of the survivors and victims and so on.

Or maybe even to like memorialize the event in some way. Process it. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of potential. But like within, like let's give it two months. How about that? Like we don't need to strike when the iron's this hot. I know we don't know about PTSD then because World War I hasn't happened yet, but like

fuck give it some time to simmer for a sec. Quoting Wikipedia, the plot of the film involves her recounting the story of the disaster to her fictional parents and fiancee with the footage interspersed with stock footage of Iceberg's Titanic sister ship, the Olympic, and the ship's captain, Edward Smith. So this is again a 10-minute silent film. To add to the film's authenticity, Gibson wore the same clothes as on the night of the disaster. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope night of the disaster. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I've got a story actually to tell you. It's sort of in this exact vein.

So one of my very good friends from way back when I was in high school is a guy named Johnny Mulder. Josie, you've met Johnny Mulder. Yeah, we have the same birthday. Yeah, you do have the same birthday, you're right. Not the exact same birthday, it's like a year off, but you have the same birthday.

We have the same day. Yes, yes, Same as my brother too. All three of you. Oh. Johnny was on the Canadian version of the TV show Big Brother, the reality show. Amazing. He got evicted, like triple evicted. They were evicting three people at once and he just got caught in the storm. There was nothing he really could have done to save himself. Because it was a triple eviction, they were all just in their competition clothes that were just like a t-shirt and shorts the whole evening, right? Because they were always just going to be doing a bunch of competitions back to back.

He ends up of course getting evicted in his t-shirt and his shorts. A few months after he does Big Brother, I am meeting up with him to like work out. He was just in like a foul fucking mood. Like I could tell he was grumbling, not with me, totally nice to me, but just like didn't want to be working out. It kind of surly about something. And then halfway through it comes out, he's like, yeah, these are the clothes that I was wearing when I got evicted on Big Brother.

And I was like, Johnny, Mother, get a different fucking workout outfit. Yeah. I was like, go change your clothes or you're going to be pissed the whole day. Why would you put that on? Da da da da da da. Yeah. Take that, but like multiply it by this is the outfit I was wearing when I got off the Titanic sinking. For real.

Oh my God. And I have to wear it in all the publicity for this movie too. And then watch yourself. Yes. The film was released internationally and did well, well received, although it got some side eye for being a bit crass and capitalizing on the tragedy so quick. Film is now lost, unfortunately, The Prince having been destroyed in a March 1914 fire at the Eclair Studio.

Shortly after the film, Dorothy Gibson suffered a mental breakdown. Bummer, I saw that coming. I wonder what that's about. Never made a film again apparently, but she had this incredibly dramatic life afterwards. Did you see this Mitchell? Yes, it's insane. It's what a life. She was at a concentration camp?

Yeah, she's with the Nazis, then she's against him. This affair that she was having with this guy just like explodes, claims his marriage, turns into a big scandal. And then yeah, she ends up dying in Europe, RIP in like her 50s, I think. like explodes, claims his marriage, turns into a big scandal. And then yeah, she ends up dying in Europe, RIP in like her 50s, I think. And people are like,

cause the thing I read that was so crazy is that one of the ways that she got out of a concentration camp was from apparently what she claims is she pretended to be a Nazi spy. Is that what it was? That's her version of the story. But then she, after like at the end of her life, she was never fully believed.

Everyone's like, you're kind of sus. Like maybe you are though. Maybe you're a Nazi spy. This lady is a little sus. I get it. But it's an interesting story just like how it all started. She was like a model for makeup ads and magazines and then now she survived the Titanic and her boyfriend turned her into a- A real housewife before they had such a thing. Truly. Yes. Before they had such a thing. Truly. Yes.

Before they had proper therapy. Oh, that doesn't even enter into the question. These people are British on top of it. That's true. None of them did therapy. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh.

So that's our very first crack at a Titanic movie. That is wild. Like within 30 days. Within 30 days. And it's exactly as chaotic as that time frame would make you expect. Probably go over these a little bit quicker for the most part.

1929, we get the movie Atlantic. This is the first time a Titanic movie is made with sound. It's dubbed in German, English, and French. It's a major hit, as most of these are. Titanic movies draw in money because people are endlessly interested. 1933, Cavalcade. This is based on the Noel Coward play of the same name.

It's a little bit of a like, we didn't start the fire approach to like the hits of recent British history. Yeah. So like second bore war Titanic, you know, like all the hits Queen Victoria dead again, you know, did you write the lyrics? No, Noah Cowher did. Noah Cowher started the fire this time. This film was reportedly Adolf Hitler's favorite film. And in 1934, he and Joseph Goebbels, the director of Nazi propaganda films,

watched it twice together, holding each other's wieners, I'm sure. I have some buddies that really are into like Oscar trivia and they think of cavalcade as sort of the crash of its day Liberals and conservative folks kind of really jumped on it a little bit of a nostalgia hit Yeah And at the time it was very popular amongst a certain set Adolf being one of them But it aged like like milk it aged so poorly and was kind of embarrassing like yeah the next year It's a best picture winner. Yeah, that's picture winner. Like that's why they compared to crash 1958 a night picture winner. Yeah, best picture winner. Like that's why they compare it to Crash. 1958, a night to remember. Hey, hey.

We talked about this a little bit in the last one. Mitchell, have you seen a night to remember? We watched it together, Josie and I did. It's so good. It's really good. Really good movie. Yeah. I was reading about this other one,

one with Barbara Stanwyck, which I've never seen, just called Titanic from 1953, which I was reading kind of had a relationship to this because a lot of Americans saw Titanic from 1953. And it was advertised as the biggest. We've all seen lots of stories of this story or whatever. We've all seen the movie before. But this is the biggest and it actually like the movie poster looks a lot like James Cameron Titanic. So I

watched that for this, I will say you did you watch this? Yes, yes. And how what did you find? My understanding is that a night to remember it was sold as like, this is the real story, not that one that we all just watched. A Night to Remember kind of stayed with me as seeming like almost like a series of short stories about the Titanic in a way that I found really enjoyable as a structure. An omnibus. Yeah, that I'm surprised people don't lean into more like you can imagine this is something where

like you could do like a mini series where every episode is about a different character right and they all had radically different experiences yeah yeah i think it perhaps suffered by my watching it in the context of other titanic movies in which context surrounded by james cameron's titanic surrounded by a night to remember surrounded by a bunch of other oddball versions of the Titanic story that I'm going to tell you all about. It didn't distinguish itself as particularly memorable. I remember thinking this sort of feels like the average of all the Titanic movies that I've watched so far. It features a lot of the same familiar scenes and character archetypes and dramatization techniques. It didn't really distinguish itself in my memory, I would say. Right. Whereas this one, A Night to Remember, it feels very British, right?

It feels like we're getting an authentic take from that side of things. Yeah, you can always trust the Brits. Yeah, there you go. One thing that struck me about A Night to Remember is that there wasn't a lot of music in the background in places where you would imagine like, oh, you could have a little string here, like kind of, you know. It was diegetic music mainly. Yeah. Instead of the like a score, a score laid over top.

But there was something very like removed and kind of stoic. I think maybe that's kind of your pick up of like, it felt kind of British and it's telling because it felt kind of reserved and stoic and non sensationalist given what it was. Maybe. Yes. Yeah. reserved and stoic and... Non sensationalist given what it was maybe. Yes, yeah. And in a way I think that really helped the storytelling though,

cause it felt very believable I suppose. And not trying to like pluck heartstrings. Another thing I remember learning about this one is that I think we all probably noticed that it has a lot of story beats in common with James Cameron's. That there's a lot of similar beats. Take the best of it. I come Jim. I was reading that he was like kind of a buff ever since they found you know the wreckage. He was sort of interested in the story like a lot of

people were and following it but then it was only after watching this a night to remember that he was like okay I'm gonna make my own version. He was inspired particularly by this one. That makes sense. You can see it on both movies. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Then to just take a hard pivot away from any attempt at realism

into the land of like kind of complete fabrication, not complete fabrication, but very broad character pastiche. 1964, we get the unsinkable Molly Brown, starring Debbie Reynolds. Did either of you come across this in your research? Yes, but we didn't watch it. No, didn't watch it. I've seen posters and I've heard about this movie. It's a musical. But it seems like cheesy. It just seemed always to me this movie to be cheesy as hell. Well, what did you think? Cheesy, cheesy. Yeah. Didn't really resemble reality.

Reminded me a lot tonally of Annie Get Your Gun, if either of you have ever seen Annie Get Your Gun, which is about the Buffalo Bill kind of traveling show. And it's got the same arc of like a young country girl what ain't got any lard in. And then she learns to read and she becomes more sophisticated. It's kind of a My Fair Lady arc. Oh, okay.

And that really is what we get. The film starts with, like, Molly in, like, a crush being swept down the raging Colorado River, and she gets, like, rescued out by this guy, what becomes her paw? Like Moses. Like fucking Moses, right? She's unsinkable, right?

Even as a baby, she's unsinkable. Whoa. And it should be added that, like, this movie is why everyone calls her unsinkable Molly Brown apparently. Like there were instances of like the unsinkable Mrs. Brown once or twice in the paper, but no one called her Molly. She was Margaret, but she's the unsinkable Molly Brown because of this fucking movie

apparently. Again, Oscar nominated, I think Debbie Reynolds in this role in like a very broad country girl who like happens to meet a young prospector who happens to strike it rich and the two of them come up in the world together and he teaches, he like very explicitly teaches her how to read in this version. Whereas like in real life, she did marry

a kind of poor miner for love who ended up kind of striking it rich and ascending to society that way. But this movie like puts a real fine point on it. You wouldn't know this was a Titanic movie if puts a real fine point on it. Yeah. You wouldn't know this was a Titanic movie if the Titanic weren't in the last 15 minutes. Oh, that's too bad.

That's what is kind of surprising to me. Yeah, it's all like her trying to come up in society and prove her like kind of snobby society, our travel, long song and dance segments that kind of don't really get, it's the same, like they only have the budget for like five songs and they start repeating them. Oh, no. Yeah. And not in like a motif way in a like we've got five fucking songs here.

We're doubling up. Yeah. Oh, no. And painted black drops, really corny singing Colorado. I love you. Like really laid on thick. That's lovely. And thank you. Kermit. And then yes. Miss Piggy moved to Colorado. Sorry, I had to. laid on thick. That's lovely. And thank you. Kermit? And then, yes.

Miss Piggy moved to Colorado. Sorry, I had to. And then kind of last 15 minutes, she happens to be on the tight. She's coming back to her love. Her and her love have fallen apart as the real Margaret Brown and her husband did in real life. They ended up separating on the way back. She literally is like standing there in her fur coat as this boat slams into an iceberg.

We get to see five, 10 minutes of her annoying people on lifeboats and then she's welcomed back home as a hero and they kiss and kind of- And she's like, Kirby! Kirby! Kirby! Kirby! Mwa is back! Yeah, exactly.

You got it. Thanks. And that's kind of it. Yeah, kind of like a nothing throw away and you get your gun knock off. Totally. That's it for that. It's moving along swiftly. 1980.

Raise the Titanic. Mm hmm. Oh, you're nodding knowingly. I'm not. Not you. Seldom are you nodding knowingly. I know that it's um. This guy who's like the first.

He was like the, this dude who was the dad novelist before Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, is that his name? Maybe, or you might know like specific things about Ray's, the title. So this is like a Clive Cussler novel. That's kind of like a Tom Clancy, like a hunt for red October. You're absolutely right, keep cooking.

Even nerdier, Clive Cussler was like this ocean explorer guy and if you're a young strapping boy who wants to hear about it, my dad was really into it. My dad's a both young strapping boy. Yeah, Tom Clancy and Clive Custler. This is a Mike Collins kind of story. Fuck yeah. And it's a ocean explorer kind of writer is Clive Custler. He likes to write about shipwrecks and pirates and archaeology and it's very much for like, I don't know, excited young white boys who want to go diving. I would not be surprised if James Cameron grew up reading Raise the Titanic. What do they do in Raise the Titanic? It's the moon landing space race with the Russians. This is a Cold War thriller?

It's a Cold War era thriller racing the Soviet Union to see who can raise the Titanic first, right? And do you remember why they are trying to raise the Titanic? I've never seen it and I've never read it So you gotta tell us there's a MacGuffin on it. Boom. Huh? Is it like some gold on the tight? It's a mineral It's some sort of mineral. It'll stop the whole Cold War. Whoever gets it. Oh, wow I didn't know we have to raise the Titanic. Yes. Was it a good movie? I found it a little bit slow and methodical.

A lot of guys like sitting in like war rooms and like battle stations and shit. I didn't end up finishing it. I got the gist. Based on my dad's taste in movies, it's the kind of movie where dudes watch it standing up pretending they're not really watching like in the back of the room.

It's like your dad is like standing up being like, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm just standing here. But it's like, you've been staying here for an hour and a half. I'm going to go walk the dog. The dog's like asleep in another room. It's like this movie has a lot of dudes I like in it. 1997 Titanic, James Cameron film of generation. We're going to talk about it over at the film club.

You should join us. Incorporated a lot of footage of the actual wreck taken by James Cameron's submersible, notably. So that was it. Sort of big advance forward. 2012 Titanic Blood and Steel. Sort of a brief mini series about the construction of the Titanic. And how was that? Didn't watch it because it was so much, but I remember them advertising a lot on CBC. It has Neve Campbell in it. Hell yeah. Oh, so it's a fictionalized version? Yes, it's a fictionalized mini series

that sort of is about specifically the building of the Titanic and it ends with the Titanic leaving the port, I think. So it's like how the Titanic was built in Ireland kind of thing. Wow. I'm like way more, I mean, mostly for Neve Campbell reasons, but I'm way down to watch that. Neve Campbell sells it, right?

You're like, oh, Cindy Prescott, all right. Yeah. You've survived a lot. She has. I trust you in this role. All the screams and stabs. Too true, all the screams and stabs in a truly insufferable airplane conversation

with Don Draper one time on Mad Men. Oh my God. One of his dry brunettes, you know? So true. To wrap up here, we've got Titanic 2. That's from 2010. This is an Asylum horror film. Are you familiar with the work of the Asylum, either of you?

We are, in fact, a movie that Josie and I watched. We didn't realize it was this when we hit play on it. Was the sequel to Titanic 2. We watched Titanic 666. Oh, perfect. Because I have a little bit about that in here too. So we can get to that. It's funny because the last time I watched an asylum movie,

it was because I thought I was watching paranormal activity too. But it was actually something called paranormal entity from the asylum. And that's very the asylum, just these kind of like shitty based knockoffs and like self-consciously bad horror films. It has a reputation for kind of being cheesy and of low quality. So first we've got Titanic 2.

Cruise liner set sail on the 100th anniversary of Titanic's doom-made voyage. When a tsunami hurls an iceberg into the ship's path, the crew and passengers struggle to avoid suffering the same fate as their predecessors. So this is Titanic happens again. But then we've got 2022 sequel Titanic 666. So tell us a little bit about Titanic 666 if you are familiar with it. You got to take this one. Yeah. Let me take this one. It is that's a marriage. He says, babe, you got this. And she's like, yeah, no, I okay. Sure. I do. I do. So the Titanic is meant to set sail on its same exact course or reverse of its course again.

Fucking again. And they're all like, we're doing Titanic three. Yeah. And they're going to, I don't know, have a moment of silence when they get there, but instead the ship is overtaken by paranormal ghosts from the Titanic. Yeah, it's ghosts this time. It's ghosts. Raised by the great granddaughter of Captain Smith.

She does like a ritual magic kind of deal to summon the ghosts. Because their belongings were wrongfully scavenged from the ocean floor. By Bill Paxton. By James Cameron. By James Cameron. Yeah. Yeah. And Bill Paxton. And yeah, like ghosts take over the steering of the ship and ram it into an iceberg. That's classic. That's pretty.

That's pretty classic, yeah. That's decent. When we got to that, I was like, wow. They really liked the idea of like the band being haunted and like they show up and like play violin and it kills people. Wow. They're evil now. Evil band is kind of a serve. Yeah.

It was like, there was these moments like that that were badly orchestrated, but enjoyable. I liked the very final little tag at the end. Titanic 3, obviously, spoiler alert, sinks, just like the other two. They keep fucking sinking, guys. I know. Icebergs, always icebergs.

She gets on the lifeboat, and then there's, I don't know, a survivor on there with her. Oh yeah, the captain. the captain has survived too. And he's kind of cold and blue and like Jack at the end of Titanic. But then all of a sudden like his eyes, it's kind of like the end of the body snatchers. He's just like, Whoa. And you realize like this isn't this life bone. Ain't safe. This ain't it. There's a death boat. He dies on lifeboat becomes a ghost that will.

Wow. Haunted lifeboat now. Damn. Did you like Titanic 666? Was it bitter or was it sweet? Was it bitter sweet? I would call it cinema. That's what she kept saying. It was not bad. Damn.

It was pretty bad. It was really bad. We actually just watched this other really bad Titanic movie. Was it called Unsinkable? Yeah. It was like a Hallmark style. It has Karen Allen in it.

You told part of the story in your episode, the Senator and the after Senator Smith, Senator Smith. It kind of dramatizes that just in a really bad, like Hallmark Christmas movie kind of way. That's not interesting. Sorry. No, no, it's not. You didn't do it. No, no, no. But we I'm just like sighing because it's true. It wasn't interesting. Sorry. No, no, it's not. You didn't do it. No, no, no. But we I'm just

like sighing because it's true. It wasn't interesting. It was actually like really bad. We were like, been a long time since we watched a movie this bad. But lo and behold, then we watched Titanic 666. Yeah. And it was kind of invigorating. It was invigorating how a movie could be worse. You're like finally some good fucking food, even if it's fast food. Right. Did it interest you at all that one of the actors was Lydia Hurst, the daughter of Patty Hurst? Color us surprised. Who did she play?

I think maybe the granddaughter of the villain lady. That's a very John Waters touch. It is, not only is it Patty Hurst's daughter, but like William Randolph. He came up in my research a lot as someone who was like smearing Ismay. She was she played. Oh, that's amazing. She was the witch Lydia Hearst.

That does change things. That changes everything. I'm sorry to say, but it adds so much. It changes the whole game. Yeah, she's there as like an actual like third hand Titanic adjacent person. Y'all talk about this dude WT Stade. Have y'all talked about that guy? No.

I thought that he was so interesting because you were talking about Randolph Hearst after the fact and like the journalism, but I was learning about this guy W.T. Stade who was on board the Titanic and he was an influence on William Randolph Hearst. He was a British journalist who like invented the style of like making the news.

He was really believed in like activism through journalism and he got really into like big expose articles about underage prostitutes. So there were people who would be like moved to move the age of consent. You know, he's doing social justice, but he's making things up in his stories and making them extravagant. He became one of the most famous journalists and he's on board the Titanic to visit the president of the United States actually. And on board, he's like entertaining his fellow like dinner mates with like stories of cursed mummies and things like that he's like this

eccentric guy he's an Esperantist I learned. Hey what are my people? A very good friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It truly never ends. So I'm sad to report I've really enjoyed this kind of walk down cinematic, televisual, memory lane. None of these is the subject of my scholarly focus for today. Oh. Today I offer for your film club consideration, you should consider this the part of the Are You Afraid of the Dark episode

where I bring out the little powder, you know what I mean? Yeah. Okay. Dated myself with that, but you know, whatever. Today I offer for your consideration the 1943 German version of the Titanic story, simply called Titanic as many Titanic based things are, this film which was personally overseen by the Nazi party's

chief of propaganda Joseph Goebbels casts a fictional German first officer as the heroic moral lead against a backdrop of grotesque British capitalism. In addition to being infamous simply as the Nazi propaganda version of Titanic, an achievement in and of itself, the film is also notable for its original director Herbert Sulpin running afoul of the SS and getting the ol' Jeffrey Epstein mystery suicide halfway through filming. Whoa! What? And it is also notable because the ship that plays the Titanic in this film, SS Cap Arcona, ends up having an even more depressing and tragic fate than Titanic herself. It's pretty depressing and tragic.

Yeah. So, a bit of a warning here as this episode, which discusses, frankly, Nazi propaganda and the deaths of concentration camp survivors and things like this is upsetting in the way that you would anticipate any story about the Holocaust to be upsetting. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, we're hanging out with Nazis today, but we're holding our noses. So, to vastly oversimplify, in 1926 the National Socialist German Workers Party, aka the Nazi Party,

established the Reich Propaganda office to get out the word about how blonde people ruled and everyone else drooled this office mutated and expanded in its control and oversight until by 1933 all public media were overseen by the Nazi Party and Specifically Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels Goebbels is even more of a Hitler than Hitler. Like he's the fucking worst, he's the shit on my shoe, right? Let's be clear with Shenandoah. Let's be clear with Shenandoah. Yes. He's a true believer of the ideology of virulent anti-Semite, and it goes without

saying that Jewish artists could not legally work in Goebbels film industry. And very hands-on when it comes to propaganda in film, his diaries are full of minutiae about filmmaking. He's kind of like a toxic film, bro. Like he is really, really in the weeds of it. Sounds like a micromanager too. Yes, well known, well well known to personally give notes and exert influence on individual productions. Lots of notes, sort of under the purview of the propaganda ministry he does this. His approach to propaganda is to dumb it way down and pointed out what scholar Hema Merlin-Prensack calls thoroughly middle class and illiterate masses in order to

manipulate them. And I take this now to be a quote from Goebbels, from the beginning, national socialist propaganda has always addressed the common man among the people and has not attempted to convert the intellectual. In the late 1930s, three novels are published about Titanic in Germany. Because again, why are you surprised? This shit sells, everyone's interested. Yeah, the Titanic pill is easy to swallow. It is a chewable, a Flintstone chewable.

It is a gummy and it tastes like strawberry. It goes down real easy. One of these novels is Titanic, the tragedy of an ocean liner by writer actor, Joseph Ritter, Helz von Filenau in this version presented as a faithful reproduction of actual events of the Titanic. So like this is a true story. It happened to a friend of a friend of mine kind of shit. Yeah. A German officer named Max Dittmar Pittman watches on as British stock speculators hope to raise a fortune by setting the world speed record with the Titanic, winning the blue

ribbon for the white star line. And this novelized version is the version that gets nipped and tucked and made into the plot of the film, so why don't I just tell you now about the plot of the film version, which you can watch on YouTube. Nazi Titanic is very easy to find and consume if you want to. Okay, I don't know if I will, but yeah. It is specifically anti-British in its cast. It's not, I would say, notably anti-Semitic, for example, or notably anti any of the other many oppressed groups that the Nazis were

unfond of and were oppressing. It's more just about like, look how noble and stoic and morally perfect the Germans in this situation are being compared to these frivolous British imperialists. It's just like that angle on the normal Titanic story. Yes. But like entirely through this fabricated German first officer character, which it presents as like having legitimately been on the Titanic. Got it.

Okay. And there was no German first officer. No, Christ no. It was people from Southampton, right? Yeah. From the jump, we see our boy Ismay, who's the president of the White Star line and the White Star shareholders are lamenting the plummeting price of stocks. We start the movie in like a shareholder meeting

where it's like a big boardroom table of all these suits and ties. And like Ismay is being like, well gang, I fucked it up again. And the stock price is plummeting. We must do something like truly it's got the subtlety of a brick. And then we see all these people

like selling off their stocks because this is a sinking ship as it were. Yeah. This is sort of relevant to what's going on with the stock market right now actually. and then we see all these people selling off their stocks because this is a sinking ship, as it were. This is sort of relevant to what's going on with the stock market right now, actually. There's the implication that these millionaire types are deliberately going to take advantage of White Star Line's low prices, buy a bunch of money,

then gin up this good publicity by crossing the ocean recklessly fast, which will drive up the stock prices, thereby making them value. That's the big stock market plot of this movie. And that is what is seen to animate the disaster of the Titanic with Ismay as its face. So it's kind of like these,

what are like throwaway lines and some of the other adaptations, like the James Cameron one, where Ismay is like, maybe we could go faster for headlines. Like this has been, instead of having a throwaway line, it's like an entire plot.

This cruelty and effectively like hatred of the poor and all this shit and desire to make a buck is what drives this. It's interesting too, because our German officer Peterson, who's sort of our moral center here, and who will always go around like, we need to inform the passengers and get everybody off safely. I always say the perfect thing.

And he's just this kind of very beautiful, typically Aryan man, fair features, like a real Hitler wet dream. And we also have sort of some other characters here. We've got Ismay and his young bride. We've got Astor, John Jacob Astor, the billionaire and his wife. There's this Russian aristocrat character called Sigrid Alinsky, who's our female lead. And she's sort of introduced as the romantic interest for this guy, Hare Peterson. And we don't get his first name. He's just Peterson, which perfect.

He doesn't have a first name. He's just here to serve you. You know what I mean? Get online. She's sort of a mysterious woman from his past whom he believes to have a lot of money. But we learned that she's actually like lost mysterious woman from his past, whom he believes to have a lot of money. But we learned that she's actually like lost her money along the way, but is able to sort of like ply her influence on this boat to attempt to do the right thing. It just doesn't work out kind of thing.

Peterson kind of only there because the Englishman who he's replacing has appendicitis. So he's not supposed to be there. He was just like brought on last minute because like, I know this German named Peterson and he's a good man. He'll be a good hand, right? And that's kind of like a trope of Titanic movies too, right?

I remember reading that Barbara Stanwyck one. It's like her husband isn't supposed to get on board and then he does at the last minute or like Jack wins a poker game and gets the ticket, you know? Yeah. The near miss slash the piece of luck that is actually very unfortunate. Twist of fate.

Yeah, just trope heaven, the story. There's some other kind of minor characters, English nobility, Cuban spy. They have a little- Cuban spy? Cuban spy. Little fluff, dramatic. I think it's kind of like, these are how silly these other characters are.

They're kind of caught up in these other Shenandigas that don't really matter. Meanwhile, we've got, you know- Our ubermensch., our Ubermensch. Our Ubermensch. And I should also add that once the sinking starts and the chaos unfolds, the Ubermensch carries himself very stoically and Germanly. And so to do the third class steerage passengers

that we get introduced to who are German, most of steerage loses their head and freaks out. And the German steerage passengers who are stuck there kind of stoically accept their fates. Right. Go down with the ship. The rich people survive Sigrid and Peterson are able to board a lifeboat and survive. Notably the band is ordered to play in this one.

They're ordered to play as the ship goes down. That's fun. They're not there of their own volition. Yeah. They're salaried employees. And then we get an inquiry where all of the blame gets laid solely at the feet of the dead captain. Ismay is cleared and very unjustly so.

And then we get an end card to really drive. This is probably, this is a note Goebbels gave, I'm sure. We get an end card that says the death of 1500 people remains unatoned for an eternal condemnation of England's quest for profit. Wow. So that's like when we used to do the moral at the end of the episode of Bitter Sweet and for me that's what they were doing too. Yeah. It's very dark-sided. That's the 1943 Titanic. Wow. Dang. Production-wise, good. Acting-wise, good. Prettily filmed. Okay, okay. They'll tell you a

little bit about the filming of this movie though, which was much less pretty. The production company Tobus provided a prestige budget of 3 million Reichsmarks. This enables them to cast a roster of well-known actors of the time and place. Tapped as director is Herbert Selpen, an accomplished filmmaker with a long list of credits to his name by this point. Selpen gets his friend Walter Zürlet Olfinius on board as the screenwriter. They've worked together harmoniously in the past and she stars as the Titanic herself. We've got the Cap Arcona, former passenger liner, not unlike Titanic, built by Blom and Voss in 1927 and repurposed by the Nazi government in 1940 as a naval barracks ship.

For the purpose of the film, we've repainted Cap Arcona in the iconic white star-lined colors. Very convincing effect in my opinion. Selpen was very particular in the way he wanted to film the exterior shots of the Titanic. Process he began in May 1942. There are many interruptions due to bad weather and looky-loos from the nearby marines. They can't shoot at night due to air raids, so they're doing like day for night shoots. It's like a whole big pain in the ass. Sulpin is kind of known to be kind of a temperamental guy. He's a former boxer.

So as it's noted, he like, he had a boxers temper. You know what I mean? Sure. These damn boxers, right? That's a theme for today's episode two, boxers, right? So Sulpin just starts venting about this like into the air and venting about like he's pissed off with the Kriegs Marine, which is like the Nazi Marines. And by this point, he and his friend, the writer Walter Zerlet Alphinius have fallen

out. So Zerlet Alphinius denounces Selpen to his friends Hans Hinkel, who's a lieutenant colonel in the SS. Eventually, it gets to Goebbels himself, who has been in the mood to make an example of disobedient filmmakers. On June 30th, 1942, Goebbels summons Selpen for a private discussion. Selpen confesses to everything. He's like, yeah, I said it. Goebbels flies into a rage and has Selpen put into custody. While in custody, Selpen is informed that

he will not be able to work as a filmmaker anymore. He is then found hanging in his cell, having apparently committed suicide. Okay, there it is. Whoa, what? So obviously this is doubted by many and regarded as a murder among much of the contemporary film community. Yeah. So escalated pretty quick there.

Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, damn. At the end of August, 1942, Werner Klingler takes over the direction of Titanic and completes Selpen's half finished film. Goebbels orders that the original director's name be suppressed on the set and in the press under penalty of prosecution.

The second it's done, it gets shelved because there's all this circumstance around it. Notionally, we don't want to show the Germans something that's full of like, I guess, like tragedy and flood, you know what I mean? It's war times, but also like we're trying to suppress the memory of this guy, Herbert Sulpin, and his name has already been tied to this film.

Right. Yeah. So doing a big to do would just kind of float his name back to the top. Yeah. And so and finally, Goebbels allows it to premiere in occupied Paris in December 1943, towards various other cities like Prague, but it's banned from being exhibited in Germany at all. And when they do send it out to theaters, it's with pamphlets that say a long, long list of, we understand that we couldn't get his name off this part, but you need to fucking, if anyone says it,

you fucking pinch their lips closed with your hands or we're sending you to a concentration, it's like fucking crazy shit. Wow. Here's a quote of one of the fluffier parts. We ask you, Mr. Theater Owner, to take all necessary precautions to ensure that the name of Herbert Soppen does not appear in any publication or advertisement,

e.g. in showcases, on easels or house fronts, in any advertisement or other notices, not even by accident or inadvertence, because the casual handling of this matter can have unpleasant consequences for all those responsible. Very threatening. We don't want to hear unpleasant from a Nazi. The Nazis were a threatening kind. Very scary situation. Window breakers, pack of pricks, a lot of them.

The film doesn't actually premiere in Germany until 1950, as in it's West Germany by then, by which time Goebbels and Hitler are both five years dead in the bunker, right? It is easily accessible in the present day for you to watch on YouTube on the channel Titanics Officers as well as on other channels. So it just got holed up in production during the end of the war and they didn't finish it until after? Goebbels put a bunch of at first unofficial like kind of half-hearted and then more official know this is banned in Germany type of blockades on it, because I think everyone was kind of quite pissy

about how it went with like, Selpen. I see. So there was just too much like bad blood and drama around the murder. And so it was like, well- Alleged murder, alleged murder. Right, exactly. They're like, first of all, alleged murder.

Second of all, I'm still working on it actually. It'll be ready soon. Third of all, arrest this person for asking me about this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Pinch their lips tightly shut about this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Pinch their lips tightly shut. Close. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And by the way, not for nothing, am I doing like fascist rhetoric and propaganda at this current moment in history. Like this is, this feels relevant. So like pay attention to shit like this, folks. Yeah. As for the Cap Arcona, her fate provides a depressing postscript to the whole saga.

And I will say this part is not graphic, I didn't try to be graphic in my telling, but it relates to the death of a large amount of concentration camp victims. So prepare yourself for that as needed. In 1945, Caparcona gets reactivated by the Kriegsmarine as she is then filled with prisoners from the concentration camp Neuengamme in northern Germany and specifically many of these prisoners are originally from Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The Cap Arcona laden with prisoners was made part of a flotilla in the Bay of Lubeck along

with several other boats including another liner called Deutschland, a freighter called Diehlbeck and a smaller boat called SS Athen that was used to transport prisoners between the boats. And my apologies for any mispronunciations I may have made. That's the pronunciation police coming for you. Yeah. The Cap Arcona built for 850 passengers held 4,300 prisoners with no food to eat or water to drink, along with 400 guards and 100 crew. In total, over 9,000 prisoners from Noyan Gamma were kept in the boats of

the flotilla, many dying in the days to come. How many could the boat hold? The Cap Arcona was built for 850 and it held 4,300 prisoners plus 500 guards and crew. Jesus. With no food or water. Yeah. Having been brought here via death march, having spent any number of years in a notoriously brutal concentration camp.

On May 3rd, 1945, the British bombers of the Royal Air Force, under the mistaken impression that these boats are carrying German soldiers, sink the Cap Arcona, and the Theilbeck, over 6,000 concentration camp prisoners are killed in what is regarded as one of the worst maritime disasters in history. As a reminder, the Titanic lost 1500 passengers for comparison. Arlson Archive, which is the world's largest archive on the victims and survivors of the Nazi regime, says, quote, many of the dead were washed ashore in the Bay of Lubeck. They were buried in many different

cemeteries in the area, often anonymously and with no information at all about where they originally came from. Skeletal remains of some 3,000 unburied victims still lie on the seabed where the ships were anchored. Oh my god. Yeah. And it was the same boat they used to make this film. Yeah. To be the Titanic. It was the stand-in for the Titanic and Nazi Titanic, yeah. And it was suggested in subsequent inquiries with high-ranking Nazi officials like after the war, because this is again May 3rd, 1945, is where the end of World War II, right? Like we're figuring out what to do with the fucking concentration camp prisoners because we're getting closed in on, it was suggested in subsequent increase with high ranking Nazi officials

that this was the deliberate purpose of having gathered the prisoners in this way was to comply with an order issued by SS head Heinrich Himmler that no concentration camp prisoner be allowed to fall into the hands of the allies. So this was deliberately, let's get them killed. That's like a sitting ducks.

Yes. Wow. So the way that I've kind of thought to wrap up today's discussion is 6,000 is an enormous number, but in order to get the sense that these were all people with their own individual circumstances, I've brought two stories, both from the Arlson archives, and one is of someone who unfortunately didn't survive this,

and one is of someone who did. And I'll end on the story of the person who did because it's just a nice way to end a story. Yeah. It's why we get to leave the Titanic with Rose, right? Yeah. Exactly. It's nice to leave on that note, but do remember that this is like, I guess,

one of the great atrocities. And unfortunately, one of the sad things about these infamous stories is it's not all cheery some of the time. One of the prisoners who died on board this ship during the Cap Arcona specifically, because a bunch of ships got bombed here, but one of the people who died on board the Cap Arcona

was a Polish national named Walary Bronicki. I mentioned earlier that a lot of these will have been Scandinavian folks. Neither of the examples I'm about to give actually are. This is actually an example of a Polish guy quoting the Arlesen Archive. By the end of the war, it is estimated that the National Social are, this is actually an example of a Polish guy, quoting the Arlson Archive, by the end of the war it is estimated that the National Socialists, which is the Nazis, had deported around 3 million Polish people to forced labour camps. The so-called

Polish decrees of March 1940 provided official clarification of their inferior status and imposed numerous bans and regulations on them. For example, Polish forced labourers received lower wages than German workers by decree, they were not allowed to leave their place of residence, and contacts with Germans were largely forbidden. From the autumn of 1942 onward, the SS had the power to send Poles directly to concentration camps for violations or minor offenses, but also for bad work. Even just being a member of the Polish intelligentsia or the suspicion of belonging to or supporting the Polish resistance was sufficient to justify being incarcerated as a political prisoner.

So fuck you, you're Polish under the Nazis. Walary Bronicki was one of these Polish prisoners deported back to Germany as a prisoner of war and forced to work as a laborer. In January, 1945, he was made to build fortifications at Meppenversen, a sub-camp of Neue and Gama. He was then put aboard the Cap Arcona where he died in the sinking. And that's kind of what we know about. We know he was born in 1910. We have a birthday and a place of birth. But in terms of what he did in life and what kind of got him to

his situation, that is what I know. Wow. Wow. Brutal. And then to kind of give us sort of a moment of hope, I guess, to remedy some of the human tragedy in that there were about 600 survivors of this who have not only survived the bombing, but starving and being denied water aboard this flotilla, transportation, death marches, air raids, however long they spent at Noyan Gamma even before this. Wow. Holy shit.

Other concentration camps as well. Here's one such rare story of triumph to send us home. In 1935, bookbinder Willie Neurath is put into custody in Cologne on charges of high treason aka you're in the communist party. After spending some time in prisons and concentration camps, he's finally released in December 1940. During that time in jail, Willie makes an acquaintance and agrees to deliver a message to that acquaintance's wife on the outside. He delivers the message, and in so doing he meets that acquaintance's stepdaughter, Eva Pakoulis. They fall in love and get married.

Yay. Yay. Says the couple's son, Bruno Nirath Wilson. It was a strong marriage. My mother stood by her husband implicitly and worked with him in the resistance. So we've got like a young politically motivated resistance couple here now. April 23rd, 1943, Willie gets arrested again and ends up in Buchenwald concentration camp. Says son Bruno, once my mother managed to visit him in Buchenwald without making prior arrangements. She simply addressed a young Lithuanian guard in his and her native tongue

and told him she wanted to go inside the camp to see her husband. He let her in. A few minutes later she was standing in command headquarters demanding to see her husband. And they actually allowed them to meet for half an hour. My gosh. Whoa. So a staunch woman, right? Yeah. Skookum. Skookum gal. Willie is eventually transferred away from Buchenwald and he

and Eva sadly lose touch. In May 1945 he ends up with the survivors on the Cap Arcona. He's on board when the Royal Air Force bombs it. Since he can't swim he remains on the capsized burning vessel. Whoa. Into the next evening. So there must have been parts of it that weren't submerged until he's eventually picked up by the British and brought to land in Newstadt. And also in Newstadt by sheer happenstance is Ava, who's working there as a naval assistant. She has no clue that Willy was on board the Cap Arcona or that he survived this bombing.

Whoa. And she had just been to the beach. That was she hears that there was this bombing and she just like kind of goes to the beach and sits there for a bit and then she comes back and she sees at the entrance of town She's approached by this grimy injured man and he's like talking at her really directly and then after a little bit that she's like Oh fuck. It's my husband. Whoa The new routes remain in Newstadt for a few years and have children Willie is involved with the recovery of Caparcona victims, as well as reparations for the victims of

Nazism. It is noted by his son, however, that he never truly recovered from his many long, hard years of imprisonment and struggle. Willy Neurath died in Cologne on April 13, 1961. And those are the stories of the tragedy of the Cap Arcona, the strange and embattled filming of the 1943 Nazi Titanic, the baffling 1912 saved by the Titanic saga, and in general the- Saved from the Titanic. Saved from the Titanic. Saved with the Titanic. I'm so sorry.

And the long history of attempts to understand tragedy by narrativizing it and putting it to film. Yeah. One of the things that I came across, I thought was so interesting. You know, the question was like, why is this dedicated to film so often this story? And I think it's the spectacle, right? The crazy luxury of the whole thing and the boat itself. You want to see it all. And like, but there was also a point made that the sinking happened within kind of the length of a movie. It was two hours and 40 minutes, which is like maybe a long movie even for nowadays. But you can, you know, narrativize that condensed time-wise into that's like quite short. You know, that's a sitting.

And so in some ways that was positive and the research I saw that it gets on film because of that in some way too. It's so fast. It doesn't take a lot to kind of condense it. I was just thinking how you said it goes down easy, like tastes like strawberries or something. And I like the way you said that because it's not directed at others. Like you didn't say that in a condescending way because I felt this way when I was listening to y'all's podcast.

I've been reading all this stuff already about the Titanic just from Josie doing this with you and having seen a lot of these versions of these stories already and seeing the James Cameron one lots of times and still listening to y'all's previous episode there's a moment I'm just kind of like wow even though you're not hearing anything new you're hearing a lot of things you've heard before the facts of it are just

kind of like Jesus if there's something gripping and fascinating that is not just purient stupid human response it's something that is captivating I think tastes like strawberries it tastes like strawberries and then I think that I would put to you that the story that I brought today in terms of Nazi, Titanic, Caparconia, etc. does not taste like strawberries. It maybe pushes back against the sort of gilded Titanic thing and brings us back to like, OK, what are we looking at here?

Like humans employing technology for the worst possible things such that many people end up killed. Propaganda, all of these things that don't kind of taste like strawberry and remind us I guess more of like the boiler room side of things than the fancy postcard ready side of things right? Like these are tragedies. Another thing that's kind of maybe a dark thing to say, I feel a lot of my thoughts around the Titanic, I keep thinking about how it's predicted somehow. It was like a prelude to things to come

in the 20th century. Like an introduction to what the 20th century is gonna be like, or what the entire future is gonna be like. And there's something nostalgic in a way, even from the vantage point of the 1940s, the apocalypse has happened so many times over by the 1940s that we're just a completely different, fucked up world. And when you think about the Titanic from

that vantage point, even, there's something more pure and simple about that tragedy that seems to sum up everything in a way that is not quite as messy as like the RAF bombed this compared to today. It's extremely simple and easy to digest compared to the things that we have to deal with today, you know? And that was sort of the point of it, right? Goebbels loved it, Hitler loved it. Nazi Germany, they were releasing like three books in the same year about this shit. That's not just to say that they're only Nazis love the Titanic, but it's to say that's... imagine that was my fucking what when I came out of the Sith. No, that's to say that for someone like Goebbels

who loved these sort of simple, melodramatic, sentimental messages, of course he loved cavalcade and Hitler loved cavalcade, right? Like that's some good nationalist propaganda right there. And so it sort of narrativizes in that way. I don't know, it narrativizes in a lot of ways. It narrativizes in a myriad of ways.

I was just reading about this famous exhibition, which would make a really great podcast episode in and of itself of degenerate art that the Nazis put on. And a lot of famous artists from that period that we think of like Max Ernst, a lot of famous surrealists and interesting experimental and modernist artists of that era were included in this exhibition.

And some of them were imprisoned and their works destroyed after the fact. It was an incredibly popular exhibition because they got the German people, probably resembling like Trump supporters of today, to all laugh at this art that they deemed degenerate, whether it seemed like it was made by queer people or crazy people. These people, they ain't like us. They're not like us, these weirdos making this art. But it was extremely popular, right? And they got a lot of people to come and see this, what they call degenerate art. And then meanwhile, the stuff that Hitler liked and the stuff that Goebbels liked

and that they put on the nationalist art exhibit. And this was filled with Greek nudes and women with big tits and strong men and beautiful Aryan boys. No one showed up to that shit. It was a total bomb because people enjoy hating on shit and like looking at the transgressive art, but people ultimately like don't want to see the same story digested again and again in that particular way. I think we need Titanic 666 to shake it up.

That's what I'm trying to say. What about ghosts? You didn't think about ghosts, you know what I mean? Give me Lydia Hearst. podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinthemy. But no pressure, bittersweetinthemy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinthemy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it.

Stay sweet. For today's Mymphamous, the sources I used were Black American perceptions of the Titanic disaster from the 1994 edition of Journal of Popular Culture, written by Robert Westport, and was a black band on the Titanic written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. from the publication, The Root published December 2nd, 2013.

The recording we used of Leadbelly's song, The Titanic was taken from the Smithsonian Folkways collection originally written in 1912. My sources for this episode include Titanic, the 1943 film, which I watched on YouTube on Titanic's Officers. I read the article Herbert Selpen and his Titanic 1943 on Germanfilms.net in their film poster section. I read Herbert Selpen's Titanic, Anti-British Propaganda in the Third Right by Hema Marlene Praneczak of the University of Vienna, September 2023.

I looked at the Arles and Archives page on the trail of a tragedy, which is to do with the bombing of the Cap Arpona and the other ships in the Fortea. I also watched many of the films about the Titanic that were discussed. Many were sourced from the Wikipedia article list of films about the Titanic. I also consulted the Wikipedia pages Titanic, 1943 film, Dorothy Gibson, and saved from the Titanic. If you want even more Titanic discussion, we're going to be discussing James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic over the Bittersweet Film Club. Join us and become a member of the film club along with Bittersweet Film Club. Join us and become a member of the Film Club along with Terry, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Eric Jo, Soph, Dylan, and Satchel. You'll get access to at least 13 episodes of Bittersweet Film Club and other bonuses that you get for your subscription fee. Bittersweet

Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Alex McCarthy and Lexi Johnson. Every photo is by Luke Bentley. Our intro song was a cover of My Heart Will Go On played by our very own special guest, Mitchell Collins. Thank you, Mitchell, for being here today, by the way. Our interstitial music was The Titanic by Lead Belly. And the song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele.

Beautiful Anonymous changes each week. It defies genres and expectations. For example, our most recent episode, I talked to a woman who survived a murder attempt by her own son. But just the week before that, we just talked the whole time about Star Trek. We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language or what it's like to get weight loss surgery. It's unpredictable. It's real. It's honest. It's raw. Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts.