A handful of warriors stranded behind enemy lines struggle to reach freedom.
But in this inspired genre reversal the warriors are crew members of a
sunken German U-boat, they're hundreds of miles inside Canada, and their safe
haven in 1941 is the United
... moreStates! One of the all-time great ideas for a movie,
"49th Parallel" won Emeric Pressburger an Oscar for Best Writing (Original
Story), and it's thrillingly directed by his partner, Michael Powell. Powell
filmed on locations across the Great White North, with an all-star British cast
(first up: Laurence Olivier) to pick off the Teutonic invaders one by
one. Only a single German (nostalgic for his civilian life as a baker) can be
deemed sympathetic, yet there's an electric air of anything-can-happen when they
find themselves among German-speakers -- a community of Hutterites -- on
the plains of Manitoba. As the chief Nazi officer, Eric Portman gives a hair-raising address and is answered in
a moment of astonishing power by the Hutterite leader, Anton Walbrook, who would
soon play the best of good Germans in Powell and Pressburger's "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943). Add that to
P&P's first two collaborations (the 1939 "The Spy in Black" and the 1940 "Contraband"), both starring expatriate Continental actor
Conrad Veidt, and you have a uniquely German-friendly wartime legacy.
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