Titanic

The film opens with a proclamation to the White Star stockholders that the value of their stocks are falling. The president of White Star Line J. Bruce Ismay promises to reveal a secret during the maiden voyage of the Titanic that will change the fate of the stocks. He alone knows that the ship can break the world record in speed and that, he thinks, will raise the stock value. He and the board of the White Star plan to lower the stocks by selling even their own stocks in order to buy them back at a lower price. They plan to buy them back just before the news about the record speed of the ship will be published to the press. (In reality, this was impossible to have occurred, since at the time the real White Star Line was a wholly owned subsidiary of the International Mercantile Marine conglomerate and was not a publicly traded company.)

The issue of capitalism and the stock market plays a dominant role throughout the movie. The hero of the film is fictional German First Officer Herr Petersen (played by Hans Nielsen) on the ill-fated voyage of the British ocean liner RMS Titanic in 1912. He begs the ship’s rich and snobbish owners to slow down the ship’s speed, but they refuse and the Titanic hits an iceberg and sinks. The passengers in first class are shown to be sleazy cowards while Petersen, his lover Sigrid Olinsky (Sybille Schmitz), and other German passengers in steerage are shown as brave and kind. Peterson manages to rescue many passengers, convince Sigrid to get into a lifeboat and saves a young girl, who was obviously left to die in her cabin by an uncaring, callous British capitalist mother. —Wikipedia