100 years since the Titanic sank

A still from Titanic 3D

A century after the mortally damaged Titanic slipped beneath the icy waters of the North Atlantic, interest in her is as strong as it ever has been.  There have been worse losses of life aboard sinking ships, particularly caused during WW2, but this disaster has the nature of both a grand tragic opera and a parable to it.  Even the Nazis were fascinated, and in the midst of WW2, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels asked director Herbert Selpin to make a movie about it, primarily to demonstrate how the British upper class were only interested in money and not in people.  It is viewable on YouTube here

Some footage from the German film was used in the British movie A Night to Remember (1958) which was a straight presentation of the event without fiction components, unlike James Cameron's version from 1997 with its syrupy and distracting subplot.  However, Cameron's obsession with every aspect of the original ship has brought it to a huge world audience, which enables people to get a good sense of what ocean travel was like 100 years ago.