Titanic

Titanic (1997)

222 corrected entries

(112 votes)

Corrected entry: In real life, the stokers in the boiler room wore heavy clothing to shield them from the intense heat, not the simple light clothing they wore in the film. (00:29:40)

Correction: In coal-powered ocean liners, the stokers (the blokes who shovel coal into the boilers), would have worn light T-shirts, or none at all as it was horrendously hot down in the engine rooms. They shoveled coal at a non-stop pace for roughly 8 hours a day, in shifts. If they wore heavy clothing, they would have passed out with dehydration after only a few minutes of work. It was the primary reason stokers were known as "the black gang", from all the coal dust they were covered in.

Corrected entry: The large diamond necklace that Cal gives rose is called the heart of the ocean. Cal says its name in French; La coeur de la mer, which actually translates to: the heart of the SEA.

Correction: While this is true, the French name is a pun on "coeur de la mer" (heart of the sea/sea's heart) and "coeur de la mère" (mother's heart). English could not reproduce this, and had to find a way to add depth and and mystique to the name. "The heart of the ocean" sounds much more glamourous and poetic than "the heart of the sea". This technique is often used to render names and appellations, and should not be considered as a mistranslation.

Sereenie

Corrected entry: When the order is given to turn to starboard to avoid the iceberg, the wheel is spun to port, the opposite direction.

Correction: From Walter Lord's book "The Night Lives On", sequel to "A Night To Remember", page 66: In 1912 a ship's wheel was rigged so that the helmsman turned it to starboard in order to go to port - a holdover from the days when ships were steered by tillers. In 1924 the wheel was rerigged to cater to the instincts of a generation raised on the automobile, but everyone on the Titanic's bridge would have been used to the old way.

Corrected entry: Just after the officer kills himself, there is a scene where many people are pulling a lifeboat, it falls and a man falls over the boat, almost "bouncing" - it is obvious this boat wasn't made of wood. (02:20:00)

Malaver

Correction: The man falls onto the boat and bends his knees, then straightens them as he rolls off the boat. Thus giving the appearance of bouncing.

Corrected entry: When Rose's mother is getting into the lifeboat and Rose runs off to find Jack, she is the only person on the boat whose breath is not freezing. (01:52:10)

Correction: At this stage, none of the people's breath is seen.

Ssiscool

Corrected entry: Throughout the whole movie, you can see the outline of hills in the background, even though the Titanic sank in the middle of the Atlantic. (00:30:30)

Correction: The outline of hills are seen in the earlier parts of the movie while the Titanic is still close to the land. After the first night sequence (where Rose goes to jump) you see no more outlines.

Ssiscool

Corrected entry: When Ruth boards the ship she walks on the plank followed by her maid. Cal and Rose are not seen in the scene. In the next scene Ruth is entering the ship followed by Cal and Rose and then the maid is in view again. (00:22:15)

Correction: In the shot of them walking up the walkway onto Titanic, it's Ruth followed by Cal and Rose and then the maid with the boxes. As they enter the ship its the same order. No mistake here.

Ssiscool

Corrected entry: When the watchtower guys spot the iceberg, the shot cuts to the bridge and the helmsman. The helmsman is directed to come "hard a starboard" which is to the right, and right into the iceberg. The helmsman, however, is shown steering to port/left despite the original command.

Correction: In fact both the command and the helmsman's actions are correct. In 1912, commands were given relative to rudder position, and were, in fact, reversed. This stemmed from the days of non powered vessels, where the tiller would be pushed to the right (starboard) in order to make a port turn. The same is true for Titanic. In order to make a left (port) turn, the front of the rudder would have to point to the starboard (right) side. Although confusing today, this was the correct command in Titanic's day.

Corrected entry: In the dinner scene, Rose points out to Jack "John Jacob" (Astor), the richest man on the ship (and also a real person). During the sinking scene, he is seen holding onto a pole in the grand hall when the glass dome breaks and hundreds of tons of water come rushing in. This is not historically accurate, because he survived and was on a life boat the whole time. (No, he did not get on a life boat afterwards.)

Correction: John Jacob Astor IV died on the Titanic. His wife Madeleine survived, but he did not. He was not, however, inside the ship when it sank, but was swimming away and crushed by the forward funnel when it collapsed.

Tailkinker

Corrected entry: When Rose is about to board the ship in the beginning of the movie, her maid Trudy is carrying two black and beige hat boxes. These are cardboard hat boxes produced and sold by Ikea in the mid-nineties. (00:21:35 - 00:22:30)

Correction: Black and beige are common colors and the Ikea items are undoubtedly replicas.

Corrected entry: Jack claims to have visited the Santa Monica Pier, which did not begin construction until 1916.

Correction: On September 9, 1909, after sixteen months of construction, the Santa Monica Municipal Pier opened to the public.

Corrected entry: In the scene where Jack is about to leave the first class dinner party he was invited to, he tells Rose, "It's time for me to row with the other slaves," etc. He then hands Rose a yellow piece of paper, but when she opens it up to read it, it is then white. (01:04:35 - 01:05:10)

Correction: This has already been corrected, the paper is of an off-white color.

Corrected entry: As the little boy is winding the string around his top and is about to throw it he has it upside down (pointed side up), yet when he throws it, it is in the correct position (with the point down).

Correction: I do that all the time. That's the way the top is thrown. The string is wound in such a way that it flips the top when you throw it.

Garlonuss

Corrected entry: It seems strange during the dinner scene that Rose's mother and Cal would make a point to mention that Jack is from third-class. Obviously they're trying to embarrass him, but it seems like they'd be causing more embarrassment to themselves to admit that they're actually sitting at the same table as (oh, horrors) someone from steerage. You'd think they would just ignore him as much as possible. (00:59:20)

Krista

Correction: Jack was only there because he saved Rose's life, so to have ignored him would have been considered extremely rude and ungrateful, even if he is from steerage.

Corrected entry: At the very beginning of when the Titanic is starting to initially sink and things are still relatively calm, some of the guards are calling for "women and children only" and the very first of the life boats are being loaded. However, a split second later the cameras pan back to the first few boats and one of the boats is half-filled with men.

Correction: It depends what side of the ship the boats were on. On the port (left) side, 2nd Officer Lightoller took "Women and Children Only" literally. It is him who says this in the film, and wouldnt allow any men. However on the starboard side, 1st Officer Murduch did allow men on if there were no more women willing to get in.

Corrected entry: On Sunday, before the church service, we see Rose's mom tightening Rose's corset. Later that day, when Jack draws Rose, she doesn't have any red marks on her skin from wearing the corset. These things broke people's ribs. She should have had at least some indication that she had been wearing one. (01:09:25 - 01:22:40)

Correction: Rose would have been a corset wearer for some years so the red marks would be minimal, that and the fact that a corset needs something under it to stop it getting dirty with sweat, etc., would stop most red marks.

Corrected entry: After Rose calls Brock Lovett, Brock and Bodine are talking on the boat's deck, Bodine says "Rose died on the Titanic when she was 17." Then he goes on to say later that she was an actress in her early 20's. Why would he say she died on the Titanic when she was 17 when he knew she had not?

Correction: They are trying to figure out if the old woman was the same Rose that reportedly died on the Titanic (her family never found her, so she was listed as missing, presumed dead). They say Rose DeWitt Bukator died on the Titanic when she was 17. Then they say that they've traced the old woman, Rose Calvert, back to the early 20's (the 1920's, not her 20's) when she was Rose Dawson, the actress. They can't know for sure if it is the same person.

Myridon

Corrected entry: The two men in the crows' nest are shown to each have a pair of binoculars to search for icebergs. However, the real men in the crows' nest did not have a single pair between them. They had left them at the port in Southhampton.

Correction: They never show the men in the crow's nest with binoculars, and they even make a point to show one officer asking another if he had found them. The officer replies "I haven't seen them since we left Southampton."

Corrected entry: Before Rose decides to leave the dinner party at the very beginning of the trip, she is wearing a necklace. When she is running outside to go and jump it is gone. In fact the necklace never appears again. (00:35:45)

Correction: The reason the necklace is missing at the jumping scene is this. There is a scene that was taken out of the movie that has Rose ripping her necklace off in her stateroom. Then comes the scene where Rose is running towards the back of the ship.

Corrected entry: The diamond in the film, "La Coeur de la Mer," is supposed to be a diamond owned by Louis XVI and lost during the French Revolution, which Lovett refers to also as the "Blue Diamond of the Crown." In one early scene Lovett mentions to Rose that "Today it would be worth more than the Hope Diamond." This is impossible: the diamond of which he speaks is in fact the Hope Diamond, which was also owned by Louis XVI, lost during the French Revolution, heart-shaped, and known as the Blue Diamond of the Crown while owned by the French monarchy. The two stones are one and the same. Also, the Hope was recut sometime in the early 19th century to its present oval shape, so that it had lost its heart-shaped form a century before Titanic sailed; this makes "The Heart of the Ocean" something of a misnomer. Needless to say the Hope Diamond was never on board Titanic, and is now lodged safely in the Smithsonian rather than lying at the bottom of the ocean. (00:44:50)

Correction: I've scoured the internet, and I can see no evidence that the Hope Diamond was ever called 'La Coeur de la Mer' (see http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmnh/hope.htm, and many other sites). The Hope Diamond was known as both the "Blue Diamond of the Crown", and the "French Blue". I think the filmmakers were inspired to make that into two diamonds: the real one, which is now the Hope diamond (the "French Blue"); and the fictitious 'La Coeur de la Mer' (the "Blue Diamond of the Crown").

J I Cohen

Factual error: At the end of the movie, the Straus' are seen lying in each other's arms on their bed with water coming into the cabin under the closed door as the ship is sinking. This is not true, their cabin was on C deck, but his body was found in the following days of the sinking. For his body to get into the open water it would have had to float through a closed door, and up several flights of stairs. Historically, they refused to leave the ship, and were last seen sitting in deck chairs. They were there when the ship sank on the boat deck. Her body was never recovered.

More mistakes in Titanic

Lewis Bodine: We never found anything on Jack. There's no record of him at all.
Rose Calvert: No, there wouldn't be, would there? And I've never spoken of him until now. Not to anyone, not even your grandfather. A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets. But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson. And that he saved me. In every way that a person can be saved. I don't even have a picture of him. He exists now, only in my memory.

More quotes from Titanic

Trivia: James Cameron drew the picture of Rose himself, and it was sold at auction in 2011 for $16,000. (01:24:05)

MovieFan612

More trivia for Titanic

Chosen answer: During the several years it took to construct the ship probably, or in any of the supplies/food brought on board, or in the furniture brought on board. A single pregnant female rat can be responsible for thousands of rats in a very short space of time (the offspring are not too choosy about who they breed with).

Soylent Purple

A pregnant female rat could have made a home in a underneath a third class couch and had the other rats then all the females would have baby rats quickly.

Answer: In addition to the other answers, rats can easily get on ships by climbing the mooring lines that tie vessels to the dock and also go up unattended gangways. They can also use temporary overhead cables attached to ships while in port.

raywest

More questions & answers from Titanic

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