20 Titanic Movie Scenes That Never Actually Happened In Real Life

William Murdoch, First Officer in charge of the right-hand, or starboard, side of the evacuation, did not take a bribe, shoot a passenger, or shoot himself. That part of the story is Cameron’s fiction. The survivors remember Murdoch loading boats until the sinking bow swept him overboard. Second Officer Charles Lightoller, writing to Murdoch’s widow, Ada, described the death as heroic. Cameron and his team apologized in person in Murdoch’s Scottish hometown.

The film shows the crew barricading third-class, or steerage, passengers behind locked gates, as first-class passengers escape in lifeboats while the ship sinks. In reality, the White Star Line installed those gates to comply with a U.S. law passed in 1907 requiring health checks for immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. And there is no evidence that anyone was told not to climb stairs during the disaster. Still, only 181 of 709 third-class passengers survived, due to complicated passageways, an insufficient number of stewards who could speak English, and delayed warnings.

White Star Line chairman J. Bruce Ismay is depicted as a bullying figure, shouting at Captain Smith to get up to speed, and shown cowering in a lifeboat. He was exonerated by both the British and American official investigations into the sinking, which heard testimony from several passengers indicating that Ismay spent almost two hours helping load women and children into lifeboats before climbing aboard the Collapsible C lifeboat himself in the early morning hours of April 15th. There were no women or children in the vicinity at the time he boarded, around 1:40 a.m. Publisher William Randolph Hearst called him a coward in his newspaper, and Ismay endured public animosity for many years.

In Cameron’s film, Macy’s co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife Ida are shown sharing a tender bedroom embrace as water rises. In actuality, survivors Ellen Bird, Ida’s maid, and Archibald Gracie, who later chronicled the sinking, described the couple sitting in deck chairs on the Boat Deck holding hands. Isidor had refused a lifeboat seat ahead of other men; Ida refused to leave him. His body was found. Hers never was.

In Cameron’s film, the ship reaches 90 degrees vertically and breaks in two around 2:18 a.m. on April 15, 1912. But according to a 2012 forensic examination of the condition of the ship led by Cameron, along with a team of naval architects, the hull broke at a much smaller angle, between 11 and 23 degrees. The steel would have snapped well before the vessel became vertical.

Titanic includes a scene where the bosses of the White Star Line boast that their ship cannot sink. The White Star Line itself made no such boast in 1911. It was the respected shipping magazine The Shipbuilder that called Titanic’s 16 watertight compartments “practically unsinkable.” In the wake of Titanic’s sinking, the dailies dropped the qualifier “practically” and left us with one of the more chilling jokes from the tragedy: unsinkable.

The movie makes it seem as though “women and children first” was one clear rule, but in reality, Titanic’s officers applied it very differently. On the port, or left, side of the Titanic, Second Officer Charles Lightoller treated the order as essentially “women and children only,” refusing to let most men board even when seats remained empty. Lifeboat 6, for example, was lowered with 28 people on board when the maximum capacity was 65. On the starboard, or right side, First Officer Murdoch took the order as “women and children first,” and allowed men to board if there were no women waiting near the boat; Lifeboat 1 launched at 1 a.m. with only 12 passengers on board when the maximum capacity was 40.

Margaret “Molly” Brown did grab an oar in Lifeboat 6, demanding that they turn back to retrieve more survivors, but Quartermaster Robert Hichens, the man assigned to row the boat, told her they couldn’t do that because swimmers would swamp it. “Unsinkable Molly Brown” was also not a nickname in 1912. It was coined by Denver journalist Gene Fowler in 1933 and became well known in 1960 thanks to a Broadway musical.

Cameron’s depiction features Captain Smith grasping the wheelhouse wheel with shards of glass circling his head. His body has not been located, but some survivors, including wireless operator Harold Bride and crewman Cecil Fitzpatrick, claimed that they witnessed him jump from the bridge wing and splash into the water, or swim near the overturned Collapsible B lifeboat as the ship’s bow sank.

In Cameron’s film, Rose owns a Picasso painting called “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” which depicts five naked women. This iconic painting from 1907 is seen floating inside Rose’s underwater cabin in the film as the Titanic sank. But that piece of art couldn’t possibly have been aboard the Titanic. Picasso kept the painting in his Parisian studio until 1924. It’s now on display at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

As First Officer Murdoch shouted, “Hard a-starboard!” and “Full Speed Astern!,” engineers reversed Titanic’s two outer engines, which were powered by pistons, but the middle engine was powered by a Parsons turbine, a type of steam turbine that turned in only one direction. Shutting off the steam did not make the third propeller spin in reverse; rather, it simply stopped the propeller from turning, eliminating the rapid water flow across the central rudder that Titanic required to turn quickly.

Cameron’s chief baker, Charles Joughin, is seen sipping whiskey as he calmly walks off the stern of the sinking ship. He did drink, and he did endure roughly two-and-a-half hours in 28-degree Fahrenheit water. But alcohol dilates blood vessels, increasing the rate of heat loss. His survival is now thought of as a physiological oddity, rather than the result of a whiskey trick. He’d also hauled bread that night, thrown fifty deck chairs overboard for flotation, and forced reluctant women into boats.

Films show Captain Edward Smith ignoring ice warnings in pursuit of a speed record. In reality, Titanic was built to carry people in luxury, not to outrun the rival Cunard liners Lusitania or Mauretania. Smith received seven ice warnings on April 14. He posted them in the chart room and altered course slightly south. It was standard practice for all shipping lines in 1912 to sail at normal speed in clear weather until ice was sighted.

Red flares in the air are one of the most famous scenes in movies. From 12:45 a.m. to 1:40 a.m. on April 15, the Titanic launched eight white socket distress rockets. Under the laws at the time, white rockets could be used for purposes other than distress signaling, so other ships could easily mistake them for routine company communications. In fact, officers aboard the nearby steamer Californian mistook the white rockets for company signals rather than distress calls.

Officer David Blair had been transferred off the Titanic on April 9, 1912, and he had mistakenly taken the key for the binocular locker in the crow’s nest with him. In those days, lookouts scanned the ocean with their eyes rather than binoculars, which were used only to examine something they’d already seen. Lookout Frederick Fleet said that even if the Titanic lookouts had binoculars, they wouldn’t have seen the dark iceberg any earlier on such a clear, moonless night.

In the film, we see wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride turning down ice warnings in favor of transmitting messages from wealthy passengers. When the equipment failed on April 13, Phillips and Bride spent 14 straight hours fixing it and communicated several ice warnings to the bridge on April 14. Phillips was swamped with over 250 queued-up messages and did say “shut up” to the operator aboard the nearby Californian, but he continued to send distress signals until the ship lost power.

A few movies have claimed that the Titanic had a rudder that was inadequate or defective. She was built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast to meet all regulations of the British Board of Trade, and tests done on her sister ship, Olympic, proved she handled just fine for a ship her size. Besides, the iceberg was only spotted some thirty-seven seconds before hitting, and no 1912 rudder would have been able to avoid it.

In the film, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe waves a beam of electric light in the water while looking for survivors in Lifeboat 14. But battery-operated flashlights were not carried by White Star Line officers or seamen, nor stored in any of the lifeboats on board in 1912. The men in the boat squinted through the dark at the stars and the faint glow of distant oil lamps. Cameron later admitted that the flashlight had been added to illuminate the actors.

In Cameron’s movie, water smashes through the glass dome covering the Grand Staircase, but the stairs themselves don’t move. When he shot the movie, his life-size oak reconstruction did float away, replicating what happened in 1912, when the buoyant staircase came off its iron mountings and floated up through the dome as the bow flooded. When oceanographer Robert Ballard went down to the wreck site in 1985, there was no staircase, just an empty shaft.

In Cameron’s movie, we see Thomas Andrews, Titanic’s lead designer at the Harland & Wolff shipyard, frozen in time in the First-Class Smoking Room around 2:15 a.m., supposedly seen there by ship steward John Stewart. However, lifeboat records show that Stewart left the ship in Lifeboat 15 at 1:40 AM, about 40 minutes before it sank. Other passengers later reported seeing Andrews on the decks above, throwing deck chairs overboard for flotation, and still others placed him standing next to Captain Smith at the bridge wing.

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