Film review: The 49th Parallel (1941)

This is an oddity.  It's by The Archers (Michael Powell, director, Emeric Pressburger, writer) but it's an early, obviously propaganda-ish work.  It has an amazing cast (Laurence Olivier!  Leslie Howard!  Glynis "the mother in Mary Poppins" Johns (as a 16 year old Canadian Hutterite)! but they're never together, because the main focus of the film is a group of Nazis on the run through Canada.  So basically, we follow the bad guys on their travels and sympathize with the various people they interact with.  But the Nazis are in a sense the underdogs, as they're stranded in a foreign country trying to escape.  They get into this predicament by being the crew of a U-boat and (a) beginning the movie by sinking a Canadian ship off the coast of Nova Scotia, (b) deciding they need to hide out for a bit, (c) deciding it would be a genius move to do it in Hudson Bay, where nobody would expect it, but (d) getting spotted going in, and (e) the U-boat getting bombed as a result, stranding a landing party whose job it was to find fuel and supplies.  It is this landing party whose journey we follow.  And what a journey!  The first stop is at the remote trading post they were originally going to target, where we get to see Laurence Olivier, the premier actor of his generation, hamming it up as a very broad French Canadian fur trader, who has just come in from the wilds after spending a year trapping animals with his Eskimo (as they said then) assistants, and was unaware there was a war on.  He gets shot making sure that an American on the radio knows that they're being held by Nazis, so they have to go on the lam.  They are helped by two people arriving in a seaplane, which they steal (after shooting the two men, and any number of Eskimo men, women and children, just so we know how ruthless they are.  They only manage to be light enough to launch after one of the remaining Eskimos picks off one of their number.  They manage to run out of fuel long before their planned journey is up and crashland in another lake, losing a couple more of their number in the process.  They wander for a bit then happen across a Hutterite settlement where most of them speak German.  One of them wants to stay and be the baker there, especially after their leader, Leutnant Hirsh (Eric Portman - by sheer screen time and lines the clear star of the film), makes a miscalculating bid to win them over to Nazism, and they realize they have to leave, but he gets shot for deserting instead.  Then the remaining three have various adventures until they are in a crowd at "Indian Day" at Banff national park where the Mounties ask the crowd to examine their neighbors to see if they're Nazis.  One of them is caught, the rest flee into the wilds, where they run into Leslie Howard as an eccentric author who welcomes them until they abuse his hospitality and sang goes from froid to chaud and he punches out the one that isn't Hirsh.  Hirsh escapes (again!) and almost makes it over the border (after doubling back east to Niagara Falls) where he intends to give himself up to the Americans (who were presumably still neutral at that point) but instead meets the fists of fightin' Canadian Raymond Massey (an actual Canadian, actually playing a Canadian for the only time in his film career).  And scene.  As you can see: definitely picaresque.  Jami's theory is that each of the encounters represents a different reason not to join the fight against the Nazis - being a (mildly) persecuted minority (the French Canadian), being religious, being an intellectual or being upset at the government (Massey is a serviceman who grumbles about his treatment to Hirsh before Hirsh reveals his true nature).  Lots of stirring speeches given by the people the Nazis encounter about how they're united as Canadians and value freedom and Nazi-punchin'.  Again, watching some of these old Wartime movies, it's depressing how much these things need saying again.  (Oh, and in case you were wondering, the 49th parallel is the dividing line between the US and Canada.)