NR | 2h 3m | Drama | 1942
Screenwriter Emeric Pressburger and producer-director Michael Powell started work on “49th Parallel” soon after World War II began to persuade the then-neutral United States to join the Allied forces. But the challenges of filming an international cast across continents (America and Europe) amid stifling wartime travel delayed filmmaking. When the film was released in 1942, the United States was already involved in the war.
Powell’s camera points at a map of America, then zooms in on the nearly 6,000- mile-long U.S.-Canada border. A voiceover explains that it’s drawn not by a river or mountain range, but by men. The border is “accepted with a handshake and kept ever since, a boundary which divides two nations, yet marks their friendly meeting ground … the only undefended frontier in the world.”
In the Hudson Bay, Canadian Air Force pilots bomb a nosy Nazi submarine, killing all but six of its crew. The six, led by Lt. Hirth (Eric Portman) and Kuhnecke (Raymond Lovell), are already ashore; they’re are determined to return to Germany, flee to Japan, or enter the United States. They slip into planes and trains, hijack cars, walk miles, and climb mountains, ruthlessly evading capture. This continues through Manitoba, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Alberta, even across the Rocky Mountains, and right up to Niagara Falls.
Canadian forces get wind of this. A manhunt ensues. But it isn’t straightforward. Repeatedly, the Nazis beguile or insult those they meet, wounding or killing several victims. These include fun-loving Canadian trapper Johnnie (Laurence Olivier); an anti-Nazi German-immigrant Hutterite clan led by Peter (Anton Walbrook); eccentric art enthusiast Englishman Philip (Leslie Howard); and Canadian soldier Andy (Raymond Massey). Some Nazis are captured or killed. Only one, Vogel (Niall MacGinnis) allows his conscience to resurface.
Portman as Hirth hogs screentime but makes it count. He keeps the pupils of his eyes frozen, while delivering his lines staccato as if sleepwalking or hypnotized. Hirth prefers robotic obedience to Hitler, not Vogel’s compassion-induced dithering.
Buoyed by Ralph Vaughan Williams’s stirring score, this film set the standard for heroism, humanity, and humor that marked dozens of anti-Nazi films that followed. Unsurprisingly, Pressburger won an Oscar for Best Original Story. David Lean’s editing and Frederick Young’s cinematography showcase Canada’s staggering beauty: vast open prairies, lush grasslands, rolling hills, still lakes, and one mighty waterfall.
Totalitarianism by Stealth
At every stage of this continental manhunt, the Nazis boast about Nordic supremacy to their hosts. Sanctuary can mean only one thing: acceptance of totalitarianism. At each stage, the Canadians, British, and Europeans counter argue that a morally bankrupt culture that undermines individuality, freedom, religion, and art is no culture at all. It’s merely barbarism disguised as nobility.As if mocking Hitler’s slogan, “One People, One Realm, One Leader,” Powell-Pressburger’s Nazis aren’t robots, they’re real people, with their own minds. They squabble, defying the Nazi party groupthink imposed on the German people. Nazi HQ valorizes the submarine crew. Their challengers in Canada rightly and hilariously dismiss them as “gangsters.”
On a farm, Hirth spots a German newspaper on a scarecrow. He perks up at the prospect of brainwashing Canada’s 500,000 Germans with Nazi propaganda. But Powell and Pressburger show a slip of a girl, humming as she energetically stuffs the scarecrow with hay. This is the Canadian way of saying, as cheekily as possible, that the typical Nazi is nothing more than a straw man.
Powell’s camera tracks the submarine’s periscope, silently breaking the ocean surface, offering a visual metaphor for how totalitarianism enters societies by stealth rather than by spectacle.
Vogel realizes he can’t be a good man, let alone a Christian, while also being a good Nazi. Peter is ready to forgive such naivete, but won’t excuse it, likening it to a blind man pleading that he doesn’t know the sun shines.
Perhaps this is how Powell and Pressburger were indicting the Vatican’s truces of convenience with totalitarianism: Italy (Mussolini), Germany (Hitler), Portugal (Salazar), and later, Spain (Franco).
In one scene, an unnamed Eskimo watches the Nazis gun down innocents. He fires in retaliation, downing one Nazi before the others board a stolen plane. His tribe has no mandated connection to the war, yet he chooses to be a part of it. Alone, with nothing but his hunting rifle, he picks a side.
“49th Parallel” asks the viewer to pick sides for totalitarianism or freedom.
