Powell and Pressburger deliver a hard-hitting drama to sway the United States into joining WWII.
Powell and Pressburger intended this propaganda war drama,
49th Parallel, to scare the bejeezus out of the United States and sway them into joining WWII. Screenwriter Emeric Pressburger also wanted to prove that Nazi propaganda head
Joseph Goebbels had nothing on him, even taking direct shots at Goebbels in the dialogue.
In the film, German U-boat soldiers become stranded in Canada and race across the countryside for the neutral United States, clashing with abundant opposition and coldly murdering along the way.
Notably, even with the staunch
anti-Nazism in the film, it’s never anti-German; it’s not without sympathy and forgiveness for remorseful soldiers forced to give up their lives and join the military just to survive, themselves.
49th Parallel also marks the first collaboration between Powell and Pressburger and the Austrian actor
Anton Walbrook, who would deliver three classic performances in his three films with the duo - trusting Walbrook with their most powerful, substantial monologues. His nearly four-minute response in this film, as the character Peter (the leader of a small German-Scandinavian
Hutterite community), to the Nazi lieutenant who makes a fanatical speech appealing to the Hutterites about Nazi ideology and racial supremacy, is immaculately delivered, and withering, ending with: “You and your Hitlerism are like the microbes of some filthy disease, filled with the longing to multiply yourselves until you destroy everything healthy in the world. No, we are not your brothers.”
With the Hungarian Pressburger, and the Austrian Walbrook, half-Jewish and openly gay, both forced to flee their homelands in the mid-late 1930s as the Nazi party hit full force, it feels intensely personal.
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