040 - 49th Parallel

Synopsis: Stranded U-boat landing party make their way across Canada to get to the (then) neutral America

Director: Michael Powell

Actors: Leslie Howard, Anton Walbrook, Laurence Olivier, Eric Portman, Findlay Currie, Glynis John, Raymond Massey

Date: 1941

How viewed: Lovefilm rental

Rating: 3/5

David Meyer says:

The joys of this film almost contradict one another: thrilling action, intelligent dialogue, riveting chase scenes, and a revealing portrait of the filmmaking mentality of another era.

I say:

Clearly a propaganda film to encourage America to join the war, but interesting for its inclusion at the time of 'good' Germans. U-boat survivors find themselves stranded in Hudson Bay and the only way to avoid capture and internment is to get to America, which was, at the time, neutral (the 49th parallel by the way is the circle of latitude separating Canada and the US). The group of 6 take over a trapper's house, 5 of them escape on a small sea-plane, 4 survive the plane crashing and turn up at a Hutterite community, 3 steal a car, get a train to Winnipeg at the time of Indian day, 2 struggle across the Rockies, and 1 hops a freight train and eventually reaches Niagara and finally (though not for very long) gets to America. The film is episodic in nature, and at each point the varying communities extol the virtues of democracy (freedom, equality, racial harmony, etc) and the Germans, through their words or actions, highlight how all these are destroyed by Hitler's vision. The film works well as a travelogue of Canada, and the plane, train and u-boat scenes are great, but everyone speaks with impeccable English accents (except Laurence Olivier who plays a French-Canadian trapper with a weird sort of European accent which reminded me of Chico Marx!), and I was quite disappointed in a scene with Leslie Howard canoeing across a lake, that the Monty Python gang didn't appear out of the tress singing 'I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK, I sleep all night, and I work all day....'