49th Parallel (1941)

Director:

Michael Powell

Writers:

Emeric Pressburger (story)
Rodney Ackland (scenario) ...

Release Date:

15 April 1942 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | War | Thriller

Plot:

A WW2 U-boat crew is stranded in northern Canada. To avoid internment, they must make their way to the border and get into the still-neutral USA.

Plot Keywords:

U Boat | Nazi | Fight | Hutterite | Winnipeg

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 2 nominations

Cast

Richard George	...	Kommandant Bernsdorff
Eric Portman	...	Lieutenant Hirth
Raymond Lovell	...	Lieutenant Kuhnecke
Niall MacGinnis	...	Vogel
Peter Moore	...	Kranz
John Chandos	...	Lohrmann
Basil Appleby	...	Jahner
Laurence Olivier	...	Johnnie - the Trapper
Finlay Currie	...	The Factor
Ley On	...	Nick - the Eskimo
Anton Walbrook	...	Peter
Glynis Johns	...	Anna
Charles Victor	...	Andreas
Frederick Piper	...	David
Leslie Howard	...	Philip Armstrong Scott

Also Known As:

Forty-Ninth Parallel (UK) (alternative spelling)
The 49th Parallel (International: English title) (informal title)
The Forty-Ninth Parallel (International: English title) (informal title)
The Invaders (USA)

Runtime:

123 min | USA:104 min | USA:122 min (TV version: M-G-M print)

Country:

UK

Language:

English | French | German

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

UK:U | Canada:PG (Ontario) | USA:TV-14 (TV rating) | Norway:12 (re-rating) (1962) | Norway:16 (1946) | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Associated Sound News Studios, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Company:

Ortus Films

Trivia:

The 49th Parallel of the title is the circle of latitude 49th parallel north or 49 degrees north. As the film mentions, it represents the border between USA and Canada, the latter of which where most of the film takes place. The 49th Parallel also crosses Europe, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Goofs:

Errors in geography: When the train is going over the railroad bridge at Niagara Falls ostensibly traveling from Canada to the U.S., it actually is heading from the U.S. into Canada. The water in the Niagara River under the bridge in the scene is coming toward the camera, with the train moving across the bridge from left to right. Canada would be on the right in the shot, the direction the so-called U.S. bound train is traveling.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Prologue: I see a long, straight line athwart a continent. No chain of forts, or deep flowing river, or mountain range, but a line drawn by men upon a map, nearly a century ago, accepted with a handshake, and kept ever since. A boundary which divides two nations, yet marks their friendly meeting ground. The 49th parallel: the only undefended frontier in the world.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Return to the Edge of the World (1978)

Soundtrack:

Alouette

Nazis on the Run Across Canada in an Episodic, Pip-Pip Propaganda Epic

The Criterion Collection saw fit to release this 1941 British propaganda film in an elaborate two-disc set, but the circumstances behind the production are actually more interesting than the resulting film showcased in a fine print on the 2007 disc. In their third collaboration, director Michael Powell and screenwriter Eric Pressburger were requested by the British Government's Ministry of Information to make a movie that would encourage the U.S. to join the Allied forces to defeat the Nazis, all this months prior to Pearl Harbor. As it stands, the film serves as a piercing if somewhat dogmatic indictment of the absolutist Nazi rhetoric and the simple-minded brutality borne out of it. The title refers to the border between the U.S. and Canada, which is immediately identified by the narrator as "the only undefended frontier in the world".

Enter a German U-boat, which gets sunk in Canadian waters, while six Nazi soldiers look for food and supplies on land. Suddenly stranded in a country not only alien to them but also hostile to their point of view, the rest of the plot is about how these men attempt to find a way to get out of Canada and back to Germany. They make their way westward meeting various people who react to their presence in divergent ways. The film's most intriguing and challenging aspect is how the soldiers are presented in various shades of fanaticism from the uncompromising zealot, Lieutenant Hirth, to the passive resistance of Vogel, who wants to abandon the cause to become a baker. The episodic structure accommodates several famous stars in condensed roles, the most familiar being Laurence Olivier as a French-Canadian fur-trapper and Leslie Howard as a reclusive aesthete. Olivier's cameo is particularly shameless with an overripe accent that portends the hamminess of his twilight career roles, while Howard's has a touch of ironic poignancy given his death from a German fighter attack soon after production was completed.

The most interesting passage occurs when the soldiers happen upon a Hutterite farming community in Manitoba, an Amish-like oasis of pacifist civility that must have served as the inspiration for Peter Weir's "Witness". Eric Portman plays the soulless Hirth with a barely concealed rage and a wavering Teutonic accent, while Niall MacGinniss subtly shows the inner conflict of a man having doubts about the necessity of a master race. Long before "Mary Poppins" and "While You Were Sleeping", Glynis Johns, all of 17, affectingly plays a naïve Hutterite girl intrigued by the soldiers. There is evidence of Powell's and Pressburger's compelling cinematic style in various shots (like the plane crash sequence), and revered British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams composed the atmospheric score that beautifully underlines much of the action.

For all its good intentions, however, the film is compromised by a narrative that rarely inspires and other than the Nazi portrayals, characters that often seem cardboard-thin. Film historian Bruce Eder provides academic commentary on an alternate track on the first disc, while the second disc consists of three major components. The first is a 46-minute short, "The Volunteer", starring Ralph Richardson as himself as he shows a theater dresser preparing to entering military service. The second is an hour-long audio tape of Powell narrating parts of his autobiography, and the final piece is an entertaining hour-long 1981 documentary about Powell and Pressburger, although unfortunately it bypasses production of this film entirely.