49th Parallel

Powell and Pressburger

Criterion DVD

It is impos­si­ble, now, to see Powell and Pressburger’s 1941 film 49^th Parallel (Criterion DVD) through the eyes of the audi­ence it was intended for. To mod­ern view­ers it seems a curi­ous mix­ture of anti-isolationist pro­pa­ganda and trav­el­ogue, framed within the sto­ry­line of a sus­pense thriller with more found humour in it than its mak­ers had intended. The story cen­tres on a party of six Nazis, off-loaded from their U-boat to an iso­lated beach some­where on the shore of Hudson Bay, who watch help­lessly as their sub­ma­rine is bombed and sunk by planes from the Royal Canadian Air Force. The British actor Eric Portman plays the senior Nazi who must lead his band of fugi­tives through enemy ter­ri­tory and across the epony­mous bor­der to asy­lum and safety in the United States. At that time America was not yet part of the Allied war effort, and one of the film’s aims was to remind Americans of the her­itage and val­ues they held in com­mon with Canadians, val­ues that were threat­ened by the film’s vividly evil Nazis. The action takes us from a lonely out­post of the Hudson’s Bay Company (where Laurence Olivier attempts to play a French-Canadian trap­per with the req­ui­site plaid shirt and thick accent); via a Hutterite colony in Manitoba; west across the prairies to a teepee in the Rockies (where an effete writer, played by Leslie Howard, dis­cov­ers that he does have what it takes to con­front the Nazi men­ace after all); and back. The cli­mac­tic scene takes place in a locked rail­way bag­gage car that slowly makes its way across the Niagara River as the Falls thun­der far below. Portman harangues Raymond Massey at gun­point, stat­ing that “it’s not the Canadian peo­ple we’re against; it’s your filthy gov­ern­ment, the whole demo­c­ra­tic sys­tem.” Massey merely sneers at this “Aryan bush­wah” and empha­sizes his dis­dain with a heart­felt “Aw, nuts.” In the face of such home­spun deter­mi­na­tion, those nasty Nazis never stood a chance.