49th Parallel, directed by Michael Powell and written by his long-time collaborator Emeric Pressburger, is a World War II pro-Allied propaganda film intended to persuade Americans to leave their neutral stance and fight the Nazis. But despite its propaganda aspect, it is an excellently crafted adventure set in 1941 across the Canadian countryside, beginning in Hudson Bay and continuing through Manitoba, Vancouver, and on to the United States border.
At the height of the war, a German U-boat wrecks a Canadian ship and cruises to Hudson Bay, where six German soldiers led by Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) go ashore to forage for food and supplies. After the U-boat is intercepted and destroyed by the Royal Canadian Air Force, six soldiers trapped in Canada decide to make the perilous trek to neutral America in the hopes of finding safety, thus, beginning their journey in a country that is fighting against them in the war. Will they be able to reach America and flee, or will they be apprehended?
The film can be broken down into multiple sections, each beginning with the soldiers escaping to a new area and encountering new characters, and thanks to David Lean’s tight editing, these sequences don’t end up overstaying their welcome. After their U-boat gets destroyed, the German soldiers invade the house of a local citizen, Factor (Finlay Currie), who is hosting a French-Canadian named Johnnie (Lawrence Olivier) and his Eskimo friend Nick (Ley On). Johnnie has been out in the wild for 11 months, oblivious to what’s happening in the real world, and when Factor tells him that the Germans have declared war, his optimistic outlook on life causes him to reject the news. He can’t fathom that people could do something so heinous. Subtly yet effectively, the scene conveys the shocking and unexpected savagery that some human beings are capable of, which is beyond the imagination of others.
The best bit in the film is its second sequence when the soldiers crash-land a stolen seaplane in a lake and wind up among a small settlement of the Hutterite community led by Peter (Anton Walbrook). Here, Vogel (Niall MacGinnis), one of the German soldiers, is reintroduced to his pre-war occupation as a baker, where he remembers what a “good life” used to be, giving him an empathetic arc in which the makers are employing the fact that not all Germans were bad apples, a choice that was met with heavy criticism at the time. There is another beautiful scene in which a man explains to the Germans the role of the leader and the freedom with which they live their lives under Peter, which surprises the soldiers, who have been trained their entire lives to mindlessly follow commands. Here, Powell intelligently distinguishes between dictatorship and democracy, demonstrating that the German soldiers have no concept of the latter. He does the same in another scene near the end, where Hirth meets an AWOL Canadian soldier on a freight train who has overstayed his leave for eight days because he is furious with his government for not letting him fight the Nazis, which is why he joined the army in the first place. Upon hearing this, Hirth labels him a deserter, but the Canadian soldier informs him that unlike the Nazi-brainwashed Germans, he has every right to express his displeasure with the government. As the film progresses, the chances of the soldiers escaping increase, but so do the odds of them getting captured, keeping the audience on edge until the last moment.
I understand Powell and Pressburger’s attempt to advocate democracy, which is critical (especially now), but as a propaganda film, it is filled with too many sanctimonious monologues that felt spoon-fed and, on the nose, which was a little off-putting. 49th Parallel might not be the best of the Powell and Pressburger films, and even though it is thrilling and adventurous, it is also preachy and propagandist.
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