276 - 49th Parallel, 1941, United Kingdom. Dir. Michael Powell.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

276 - 49th Parallel, 1941, United Kingdom.  Dir. Michael Powell.

Oh, Canada!

The Nazis are trying to invade you.  Perhaps your brave and fearless heroes can fight them off.

A U-boat submarine enters Hudson Bay.

They sink a Canadian ship.

The leader orders a group of six men to make their way to the Hudson Bay Trading Company, occupy it, and hoist the Nazi flag.

The men make it ashore only to watch as the Royal Canadian Air Force bombs their sub to smitherines.

Now they are on their own.

They can take the Hudson Bay Trading Company, but then what?  They will need to find a way out.  The United States has not yet entered the war.  They are still neutral.  If the men can make it South of the 49th Parallel, then they will no longer be enemy combatants in enemy territory.  They can make their way safely back to Germany.

They do, however, intend to inflict as much damage as possible on their route.  For the fuehrer.

The make it to the Hudson Bay Trading Company.  And steal their furs.  And steal their guns.  And wipe them out.

The trading post is a place of diversity.  The Inuit Eskimos live there.  British Canadians live there.  French Canadians live there.  They work together.  They are friends.

Trapper Johnnie has been hunting and trapping for eleven months.  He has just come back.  With a bounty of booty.  Mounds of furs.  And a face of fur.  He bathes.  He shaves.  He radios his results.  He celebrates with his fellows.  Until the Nazis arrive.

Johnnie the Trapper is played by Sir Laurence Olivier.  Who starred and directed in a film we just saw two days ago, Hamlet (1948), made seven years after this one, and made possible by this one.  The success of 49th Parallel set up Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to create the Archers and go on to make masterpieces, and it also set up Laurence Olivier to start his own production company and make his own films, beginning with Henry V in 1944.

Lieutenant Hirth, the leader of the gang of six, produces an accurately drawn map of the area.  Johnnie is impressed.  How did he get it?  A man whom the locals had known as a missionary was really a German spy who had come in to map out the area.  Johnnie discovers he had been betrayed.

The Nazis extinguish Nick the Eskimo.  Then they get rid of Johnnie the Trapper.  He looks at them as he expires.  He promises that after the Allied forces win the War, they will send Germany some missionaries.

A seaplane lands in the Bay, bringing routine supplies.

The Nazis shoot the men as they come ashore.  They shoot some of the natives as they scatter in fear.  They take over the plane.  They fill it with furs and guns and supplies.  They fill it with their own six bodies.  They try to take off.  They are too heavy.

AND THEN THERE WAS ONE.

The film takes a page from Agatha Christie as the six men slowly diminish over the course of the film.

The first one will be shot by an Inuit as he steps out onto a pontoon to lighten the load.  The Inuit smiles.  He has helped lighten the load.

Over the course of the film the others will get knocked off one by one until their leader, Hirth, is left on a train, trying to make it to America.

Even the Nazis are trying to get to America.

Along the way they will go to Manitoba, a Hutterite community (like the Mennonites or Amish), Winnipeg, Vancouver, Banff, the Rockies, and Niagara Falls.

The Hutterite community is led by Peter, played by Anton Walbrook, whom we saw earlier this year in Michael Powell's The Red Shoes (1948), and features a performance by teenage starlet Glynis Johns, who also had a role in yesterday's The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and who would go on to a long and successful career.  She may be most known to the public for her performance twenty-three years later as the mother in Mary Poppins (1964).  As sixteen-year old Anna, she is strong and forceful, a hard worker, greeting the men with hospitality, welcoming them, and then unafraid to stand up to them when she learns who they are.

She will even win over one of them, Vogel, as he rediscovers what it means to live in a community of faith.

Leslie Howard also makes an appearance, as historian and writer Philip Armstrong Scott, who avoids the war by studying and writing about the indigenous people while living in a tepee in the wild.  Howard had a great career, starring in films such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Of Human Bondage, Romeo and Juliet, The Petrified Forest, Pygmalian, Intermezzo, and as Ashley Wilkes himself in Gone with the Wind.

In fewer than two years after the release of this film, Leslie Howard himself would be shot down by Germans while flying from Bristol to Lisbon.

People have speculated that his civilian plane was shot down because it was mistaken for a military plane; that it was shot down out of retaliation for not having filed a flight plan; that Howard was mistaken for Winston Churchill's bodyguard and Howard's manager for Churchill (Churchill was scheduled to fly but rescheduled due to a premonition (or secret intercept)); that Howard was on an actual secret mission; or that he was shot down for the work he was doing for the Allies, including this film.

Raymond Massey appears in a strong scene at the end.

49th Parallel is an engaging war-time thriller, moving from dramatic action-and-adventure set piece to set piece in a manner similar to Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.  Yet in this case, the protagonists are the bad guys.

Powell and Pressburger (the screenwriter, who would join forces with Powell as a filmmaking team) humanize both the heroes and the Nazis, creating individual characters rather than caricatures.  It was especially daring of them at the time to have one of the Nazis turn to good, longing to go back to a way of life similar to one he had previously known.

This film is entertainment made for a noble cause.