49th Parallel (film)

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, U-37, a German U-boat, sinks a Canadian freighter, then evades the RCN and RCAF by sailing into Hudson Bay. While a raiding party of six is ashore in search of food and fuel, the U-boat is sunk by RCAF bombers. The six survivors set out for the neutral United States, led by Lieutenants Hirth and Kuhnecke.

When a floatplane is dispatched to investigate reports of the sinking, the Germans open fire, killing the pilot and some of the local Inuit. They steal the aircraft, but cannot achieve takeoff because they are overloaded. One sailor steps out onto a float to throw out the guns and is shot and killed by a member of the Inuit, thereby lightening the load for take-off.[10]

Heading south, the floatplane runs out of fuel and crashes into a lake in Manitoba, killing Kuhnecke. The Germans are welcomed to a nearby Hutterite farming community. The fugitives assume that the Hutterites are sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but some of them are refugees from Hitler's Germany, and Hirth's fanatical speech is eloquently refuted by Peter, the community's leader. One of the sailors, Vogel, would rather join the community and ply his trade as a baker, but he is tried by Hirth and summarily executed for desertion and treachery.

Hirth, Lohrmann and Kranz arrive in Winnipeg. Hirth decides they will travel west to Vancouver and catch a steamship for Japan. They hijack a car, then take a train that stops in Banff, Alberta, during Banff Indian Days.[11] A Canadian Mountie addresses the crowd and Kranz is arrested when he panics.

Fleeing across the Rocky Mountains, the two remaining men are welcomed to a lakeside camp by an eccentric English writer named Philip Armstrong Scott, who takes them for lost tourists. They turn on him, burning his manuscript and his precious paintings. Scott and his men pursue them. Lohrmann finally rebels against Hirth's leadership and takes off by himself. Lohrmann is cornered in a cave. Scott is wounded, but enters the cave and beats Lohrmann unconscious.

Hirth, the last fugitive, meets Andy Brock, a Canadian soldier who is absent without leave, in the baggage car of a Canadian National Railway train near the Canadian-US border. Hirth knocks Brock cold with the butt of his gun and steals his uniform and dog tags. After the train crosses into the United States at Niagara Falls, Hirth surrenders his gun to a U.S. Customs official and demands to be taken to the German embassy. Brock tells the official that Hirth, now world famous, is wanted in Canada for murder, and points out that neither of them is listed on the freight manifest, so they cannot enter America. Using this technicality Hirth and Brock are sent back to Canada. As the train returns over the bridge, Brock dons his uniform cap, tells Hirth to put his hands up, and a solid punch is heard.

The U-boat crew

• Richard George as Kommandant Bernsdorff
• Eric Portman as Lieutenant Hirth
• Raymond Lovell as Lieutenant Kuhnecke
• Niall MacGinnis as Vogel
• Peter Moore as Kranz
• John Chandos as Lohrmann
• Basil Appleby as Jahner

The Canadians

• Laurence Olivier as Johnnie, the trapper
• Finlay Currie as the factor
• Ley On as Nick, the Eskimo
• Anton Walbrook as Peter
• Glynis Johns as Anna
• Charles Victor as Andreas
• Frederick Piper as David
• Leslie Howard as Philip Armstrong Scott
• Tawera Moana as George, the Indian
• Eric Clavering as Art
• Charles Rolfe as Bob
• Raymond Massey as Andy Brock
• Theodore Salt and O.W. Fonger as the United States Customs officers

The opening credits and dedication appear over an aerial panorama of the Canadian Rockies. The opening shot reads:

This film is dedicated to Canada and to Canadians all over the Dominion who helped us to make it; to the Governments of the USA, of the Dominion of Canada, and of the United Kingdom, who made it possible, and to the actors who believed in our story and came from all parts of the world to play in it.

Powell's interest in making a propaganda film set in Canada to aid the British war effort dovetailed with some of Pressburger's work. Although only a concept during pre-production, a screenplay began to be formulated based on Pressburger's idea to replicate the Ten Little Indians scenario of people being removed from a group, one by one.[12] While Powell and Pressburger developed the screenplay, additional photography was assembled of the scope and breadth of Canada. All the opening "travelogue" footage was shot by Freddie Young with a hand-held camera out the windows of various aircraft, trains and automobiles on an initial trip across Canada.[13]

The U-boat was built by Harry Roper of Halifax, Nova Scotia and towed to Corner Brook, Newfoundland, where it was "shot down" by the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Lockheed Hudson bombers in the Strait of Belle Isle at the beginning of the film.[12] Powell forgot that Newfoundland was at the time a Crown Colony, not a part of Canada. As a result, when they moved the full-sized submarine model there, it was impounded by Customs & Excise, which demanded that import duty be paid. Powell had to appeal to the Governor of Newfoundland, citing the film's contribution to the war effort.[14][15]

The "U-37" carried two 1,000 lb bombs supplied by the RCAF. Powell did not tell the actors that they were aboard, as he thought that they might become nervous. The actors were replaced by dummies before the bombs were detonated.[16] Powell's voice can be heard faintly in some of the submarine scenes. Once, when the camera boat almost collides with the submarine, Powell says, "Keep rolling."[16] The men in the lifeboat at the start of the film were mainly local merchant seamen, many of whom had already been torpedoed.[16]

One of the camera grips, Canadian teenager William Leslie Falardeau, also played an aviator on the rescue floatplane as it arrived at Cape Wolstenholme. In the film, he was shot and apparently killed by the Nazis before they commandeered the aircraft.[17] A second role for him was as a double for Raymond Massey in a few scenes.[18] Before the film was released, Falardeau became an RCAF pilot and was killed at age 19 in an aircraft accident in Britain.[19]

Lovell nearly drowned in the scene where the commandeered floatplane crashes. Even those who could swim (which Lovell could not) became flustered when the aircraft sank faster than anticipated; the stink bomb that was thrown in to "heighten the turmoil" added greatly to the chaos. A member of the camera crew jumped in and saved the actor.[16]

The Hutterites near Winnipeg allowed the film company into their community. Like the better known Amish, they live in simple, self-sufficient communities, leading an austere, strict lifestyle. Elisabeth Bergner was originally cast in the role of Anna. When a Hutterite woman saw Bergner painting her nails and smoking, she became so incensed that she rushed up, knocked the cigarette from the actress's mouth and slapped her in the face. Powell had to make peace with the community and with the outraged star. Bergner later deserted the film, refusing to come back to Britain for the studio scenes. It is believed that, as an ex-German national, she feared for her life if the Nazis were to invade. Glynis Johns, then little-known and at the beginning of her film career, stepped in to replace Bergner. However, many on-location wide shots in which Bergner appeared were salvaged for the film; Powell joked that this would be a rare instance of an established star standing in for a lesser-known actress.[20] The initial long shots of Anna are of Bergner. For the scene where the Hutterites listen to Eric Portman's impassioned pro-Nazi speech, the actors were all "hand picked faces". Over half were refugees from Hitler.[12]

Notable crew members included Freddie Young as director of photography, David Lean as editor. Raymond Massey's brother Vincent Massey, then Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and future Governor General, read the prologue.

Arthur Horman did a week's uncredited work on the script in Montreal, writing the Laurence Olivier and Raymond Massey sequences. He later wrote Desperate Journey, which has a similar story.[3]

Ralph Vaughan Williams provided the stirring music, his first film score. It was directed by Muir Mathieson and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Along with the credits for the actors before the title at the beginning of the film, there is a credit for "The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams".

The film was meant to cost £68,000 but ended up costing £132,000 of which the government provided less than £60,000.[21][1]

Ironically, Pressburger was still an "enemy alien” as far as the British government was concerned, and when he returned from Canada, he was imprisoned and threatened with deportation until Powell and the Ministry of Information intervened.[9]

The film was picked up by Columbia Pictures for a 1942 American release and retitled The Invaders. American censors cut 19 minutes from the film, including the speech by the fanatical Nazi commander who claims that Eskimos are "sub-apes like Negroes, only one step above the Jews", which was removed to avoid offending segregationists in the American South.[22] The American film trailer was made on the set of the film The Talk of the Town, under the title It Happened One Noon, with stars Cary Grant, Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman telling the director George Stevens about seeing the exciting film during a two-hour lunch break.

• 49th Parallel at the TCM Movie Database
• 49th Parallel at AllMovie
• 49th Parallel at IMDb
• 49th Parallel at Rotten Tomatoes
• 63rd place in the British Film Institute's Ultimate Film Chart
• 49th Parallel at the BFI's Screenonline, with full synopsis and film stills
• Reviews and articles at the Powell & Pressburger Pages
• 49th Parallel: The War Effort an essay by Charles Barr at the Criterion Collection