49th Parallel (1941) is simply one of the best wartime propaganda movies ever made, and I’m not just saying that because it takes place in my native Canada. The film — produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger before they went on to do The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948) and other classics — is a little more self-critical than you might expect, and it features such glorious sights as Laurence Olivier playing a Quebecois fur trapper, and a teenaged Glynis Johns playing a Hutterite, years before she would play the outlaw love interest in The Court Jester (1956) and the suffragette mother in Mary Poppins (1964).
I have already commented on the film a bit here, in an essay on war movies. Now, I just have a few comments on the DVD that was put out two months ago by the Criterion Collection.
The disc includes about an hour of audio recordings made by Powell, and I especially like the story he tells about the trouble he had getting things through customs in Newfoundland, which was not yet part of Canada at that time. I also like the way he recalls touring Canada and “marvelling at Toronto’s ugliness”.
The disc also includes an audio commentary by Bruce Eder, and it is generally informative, though I must quibble with a couple of his statements. First, I am not sure that “Christian fundamentalists from Germany” is the best way to describe the Hutterites — given that Jakob Hutter lived in the 16th century and Fundamentalism is a movement that arose in opposition to modernity in the 20th century — and second, Vincent Massey, whose brother Raymond has a part in this film, was never, ever one of our prime ministers. He was a Governor-General in the 1950s, yes, but that’s it.
Perhaps I’m nitpicking, but given that this audio commentary was recorded for the laserdisc edition in 1990, it’s not like the good folks at Criterion haven’t had time to fix any of the errors!
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In