The 49th Parallel (1941)

This Michael Powell film was widely seen as a propaganda effort to encourage America to become involved in the war by appealing to a cultural and democratic kinship with Canada. The film concerns six survivors of a German U-boat that had been torpedoing shipping out of the Gulf ot St. Lawrence. Stranded in Canada, the Nazi’s attempted to make their way west to Vancouver and a rendevous with a Japanese submarine, along the way they are gradually picked off and encounter various upright Canadian citizens, played by such name stars of the UK and Commonwealth as Laurence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, Leslie Howard, and Raymond Massey. Feels like a kind of inverted version of Hitchcock’s Saboteur, though that wasn’t released untill the following year. This film is made by its ‘guest stars’, who represent a cross section of diverse Canadian types, meant in turn to be symbolically representative of a diverse United States. Eskimo, French Canadian, Germanic emigre, and American Indian, all show a decency that the ideologically blinded Lt. Hirth (Eric Portman gives a committed performance in this effective Nazi villain role) can’t even understand, while some of his cohorts are allowed more human emotions, one even tries to defect. This could have been merely a gimmicky piece of propaganda, which I admit it technically is, but its so well done and has such a good spirit about it, probably the best patriotic movie ever about Canada, though I can’t rightly think of a single other one. Grade: A-