Movies about the Titanic have come and gone and many such movies, from blockbuster epics to cheap low budget movies (some were so low budgeted that the camera crews tilted their cameras instead of tilting the set!) have made their way from the movie theater and the TV, to video and later to DVD.
Yet little has been said about the Lusitania, whose sinking opened a lot of potential.
The story behind the Titanic can be summed up as follows:
Ship sets sail on its maiden voyage.
Ship hits an iceberg.
Ship sinks in the mid Atlantic.
Casualties mount.
A few survive.
End of the story.
But the Lusitania had a story far more complex. Were they bringing arms to England? Were passengers warned? Were dispatches sent to the Captain? Was the Captain innocent? Or was he guilty? These are complex questions with no real simple answers.
The movie was very well done and sure, some facts were distorted. It was war. And every historian knows that the first casualty in a war is the Truth.
Unlike TITANIC (1998), the central characters in this feature were not fictitious. They really did exist. Prof. Ian Holbourn (born November 5, 1872 and died September 15, 1935) was a passenger on the Lusitania. And he really befriended a young girl named Avis Dolphin (born 1903? and died February 5,1996).
And that "good German" on the U-boat that sank the Lusitania was not a fictitious character added to keep things politically correct, either. He also existed. Quartermaster Charles Vogele allegedly refused to relay the order to fire the torpedo and he was tried and courts-marshaled, and spend 3 years in prison for his crime. (Some accounts claimed that Voegele was an electrician, not a Quartermaster.)
It was no secret that Captain Turner later admitted that had the roles been reversed, he wouldn't had behaved any differently than Lt. Capt. Schwieger, who gave the order to fire that torpedo.
I rate this movie an 9 out of 10.
