the day the nazis came to hudson bay
by Douglas Messerli
Emeric
Pressburger (screenplay, based on a scenario by Rodney Ackland and
Pressburger), Michael Powell (director) 49th
Parallel / 1941, 1942 USA
Yesterday
for the first time I saw Michael Powell’s 1941 war propaganda film, 49th Parallel, a work aimed
at encouraging the then neutral United States to enter World War II. Oddly, the
German attack that Powell and screenplay writer Emeric Pressburger imagine is
not on US soil, but on our neighbor to the north, Canada.
It’s more than a little ironic—given our
current president’s mania about walls between countries—that their film begins
with a statement describing the US-Canada border as the “only undefended
frontier in the world,” establishing from the beginning that if a small band of
German “invaders” (the movie was titled The
Invaders when it was released in the US) are willing to attack Canada, they
might certainly choose to do the same to its neighbor to the south.
After a shoot-out with the native Eskimos,
these U-Boat travelers attempt to highjack a small water plane, which they
cannot get into the air, being forced to jettison most of their weapons and one
of their men, who as he tosses away the rifles is shot by a member of the
Inuit. Another of their leaders Lieutenant Kuhnecke (Raymond Lovell) is killed
when the small bi-plane runs out of fuel and crashes into a Manitoba lake.
Vogel, meanwhile, reveals that before the
war he was a baker, and is immediately attracted to both the community’s kitchen
and a young girl working there, Anna (Glynis Johns); since their current baker
is not good with bread, Vogel becomes a big hit, and determines to stay with
the community doing what he loves best. After a brief trial by Hirth, Vogel is
executed for desertion.
Now down to only three, they attempt to
make their way to Vancouver, from there to escape to Japan. But in Banf,
Alberta, Kranz is spotted by a member of the Canadian Mounties and arrested.
Once more, as at the Hutterite community,
they are greeted kindly as tourists who have lost their way, this time at a
camp where a writer named Philip Armstrong Scott (Leslie Howard) is staying,
revealing that he owns a Matisse and Picasso painting.
The now desperate thugs turn on him, destroying
his paintings and the manuscript on which he has been working before shooting
him. Impossibly, Scott, a bit like Johnny, the Trapper, survives and goes in
pursuit of the final survivor, Lohrmann, who has himself rebelled against Hirth’s
leadership, who has holed up in a cave where Scott tracks him down, beating him
to death.
All of this played out to music compose by
Ralph Vaughan Williams and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. David
Lean edited.
It just goes to show you how even
propagandistic work can be a lot of fun. And since there is no possible way to
take much of this very seriously, Powell’s third film can be now
recognized as a kind of marvelous fantasy not very different from his later
great works such as Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffman, and Peeping
Tom.
Los Angeles, April
27, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (April
2019).
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