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U-37, the first German submarine to reach Canada, sinks a merchant ship in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then runs for cover in Hudson Bay. Captain Bernsdorff sends men ashore to capture a trading post - just before U-37 is destroyed by an RCAF bomber. Lieutenant Ernst Hirth, eager but inexperienced leader of the shore party (comprising his resentful deputy Lieutenant Kuhnecke and the sailors Vogel, Kranz, Lohrmann and Jahner), follows his orders regardless. In the trading post, the Factor is updating French-Canadian trapper Johnnie Barras (just back from eleven months in the wild) on the outbreak of war when Hirth and his men burst in, injuring the Eskimo servant Nick. After an edgy night, a radio ham from Grand Rapids, Michigan, calls up for his regular chess game with the Factor and Johnnie shouts an alarm into the microphone. Jahner shoots him, and he later dies. Knowing that a seaplane will come to the post to investigate, the Nazis plan to hijack it and fly to the neutral U.S.A. They take the plane (with much loss of life), but Jahner is shot by an Eskimo marksman as it takes off. Kuhnecke misjudges the plane's fuel reserves and dies when he crashes it into a lake, still well north of the 49th parallel. The four survivors come upon a Hutterite community of émigré Germans, led by Peter. The gentle Vogel befriends the fifteen-year-old Anna and, impressed by the community's spirit, volunteers to bake its bread. Hirth takes the Hutterites for secret Nazi sympathisers and openly appeals for their help at a general meeting, where Peter angrily refuses him. While Hirth, Kranz and Lohrmann prepare to move on, Peter persuades Vogel to stay on as the baker. But Hirth returns and summarily executes him for desertion. The three Nazis reach Winnipeg, and learn that the Mounties are on their trail. They set off for Vancouver, intending to take a Japanese boat to Russia. Mounties suspect their presence at the Indian Day celebrations in Banff, and Kranz is arrested when he panics and reveals his identity. Hirth and Lohrmann proceed on foot across the Rockies and stumble into the camp of Philip Armstrong Scott, an English aesthete and academic researching the history and culture of the Blackfoot Sioux. They respond to his hospitality by burning his paintings, books and research notes and tying him up, but he breaks free and captures Lohrmann. The wounded Hirth hops the freight car of a train heading for the U.S. border and overpowers fellow stowaway Andy Brock, an AWOL Canadian soldier. The train halts at the border, near Niagara Falls, and Hirth identifies himself to the U.S. customs officers, demanding to be taken to the German embassy. But Brock persuades them to classify himself and Hirth as "improperly manifested freight" and to return the carriage to Canada. Now disarmed, Hirth is no match for Brock's fists...

Thanks to the surge of new interest in Powell and Pressburger in recent years, the genesis of 49th Parallel is well established: Powell has told interviewers Kevin Gough-Yates (1970) and David Badder (1978) how, in the early months of 1940, he met with Kenneth Clark (director of the National Gallery, and recently appointed head of the Ministry of Information's new Films Division) and found himself invited to make a film for the war effort with MOI backing. He turned down the proposal of "a film about mine-sweeping", and countered with the suggestion that he be sent to make a film in Canada: "The reason was that I'd read a feature article a few weeks before by Beverley Baxter, a Canadian journalist very popular in London. It was about the fact that Canada had come into the war in spite of French-Canadian resistance, and how eventually the influence of Canada would bring America into the war .. .". Clark was persuaded that the project was worth researching, and came up with the funds to permit Powell, Pressburger and three associates to visit Canada, devise a storyline and plan the production. Pressburger formulated the basic story idea during the Atlantic crossing; Powell elaborated it for the Canadian authorities, who proved enthusiastically cooperative; the project was 'sold' to Duff Cooper (Minister of Information), over financial objections from the Treasury; and there was then a race to complete the script and the location filming before the onset of winter in the Arctic Circle.

It's worth restating this production history, because it gives the lie to persistent assumptions that 49th Parallel was a cut-and-dried propaganda commission from the MOI. Although the film was conceived and made (and, clearly, accepted by its audiences) as a contribution to the war effort, the notions of 'patriotism' on which it rests are remote from those outlined in the MOI's 1940 document "Programme for Film Propaganda" (quoted in full as an appendix to lan Christie's Powell, Pressberger and Others, BFI, 1978). They are not so remote, however, from those explored in The Archers' later wartime productions, and the continuing fascination of 49th Parallel — Powell and Pressburger's third feature in collaboration — is precisely that its idiosyncratic way with stereotyped characters and situations pre-echoes the complexities and conflicts of a film like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Placing the film historically involves not only seeing it as a pioneering attempt to deconstruct Nazi ideology and to construct the many shades of liberal humanism ranged against it, but also recognising that the MOI's role was, finally, as marginal to Powell and Pressburger's rapidly evolving ambitions as were the roles of their commercial producers of the time. The seeds of controversies-to-come (notably in relation to Blimp and A Canterbury Tale, but also several of the post-war films) are already generously scattered through 49th Parallel.

The film violates rule one of all propaganda codes by taking The Enemy for its leading characters, and then proceeding to humanise them as a military group in terms familiar to all readers of military adventure from C.P. Wren onwards: the inexperienced commanding officer, blustering his way through difficulties, using inflexibility to camouflage his insecurities; the all-but-insubordinate deputy, secure in his technical skills and scornful of the fact that his superior joined the Party only in 1936, whereas he has been a member since its inception; and the four ordinary rating-drones, one of whom turns out to have barely closeted gentle and humane impulses. The situations into which Pressburger pushes this group are, naturally, designed to lay bare the ideological sinews behind the clicked heels and Hitler salutes ("Don't forget that this was one of the first important films about the ideology of the Nazis and our own . . . This jackboot philosophy of the Germans was really so" - Pressburger to Gough-Yates, 1970). But the film conspicuously avoids any implication that German Nazis should be seen as a monolithic threat. Indeed, Pressburger's insistence on differentiating between the members of the Nazi group, coupled with the plot device of casting them as vastly outnumbered underdogs ("Two brave Nazis against 11 million Canadians", as a German headline has it in one of the climactic montages), produces some quite disturbing moral ambiguities — most remarkably in the Hitchcockian crowd scene at the Indian Day celebrations at Banff, where the suspense element is neatly double-edged: will the Nazis be clever enough to conceal their identities, or will one of them crack?

The other side of this coin is the fact that the film's representatives of the Allied fighting spirit are, at best, a motley crew: the elderly Factor, as cantankerous and ineffectual as Blimp, the pacifist Hutterites with their quasi-Communist philosophies, a daffily disengaged English academic ("Nazis! That explains everything! Your arrogance, your stupidity, your bad manners!"), and a deserting Canadian soldier. All of these except the Hutterites (presented as aggrieved refugees from Nazism) do, in fact, come out fighting, although the film shies away from displays of violence, rendering both Scott and Brock's recourse to fisticuffs as off-screen sounds. Politically emblematic images and characters open and close the film. The first scene shows a German submarine breaching Canadian territorial waters; then the Hudson Bay episode uses Johnnie Barras as a representative of the French-Canadian position, first impulsively reluctant to get involved in someone else's war, then impulsively making a brave stand that costs him his life. The final scene takes the film (at last!) to the 49th parallel — "the only undefended frontier in the world" — and shows two archetypally hard-boiled U.S. customs men setting a fine example to their nation by rallying to the anti-Nazi cause.

But the choice of the Hutterite community and Philip Armstrong Scott's camp as settings for the two main intervening episodes renders the 'Why We Fight' questions in terms that most audiences must have found decidedly eccentric, since it elides all military considerations and posits 'defence' as a matter of protecting the rights of refugees to uphold their religious and social ideals and of saving Picasso, Matisse and Thomas Mann from the bonfire. In other words, the film foregrounds spiritual considerations in a way that looks forward directly to A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death. Given that Powell came to the project directly from his peerless short, An Airman's Letter to his Mother, which constructs a spiritual biography of an absent man with brilliant precision and economy, it's no surprise that several commentators have identified the figure of Scott as Powell's inscription of himself into his film.

The film anticipates The Archers' later achievements in many other ways too. There is even a hint of the aspiration to a Gesamtkunstwerk in the main titles, which bill Vaughan Williams' score with the stars, above the title. The major weakness here, overcome in the later films, is the basis in documentary - travelogue, almost - which leaves several of the performances (notably those from Olivier, Portman and Massey) looking awkwardly actorish, in need of a more theatrical stylisation to make them fully viable. Still, the film's lack of complacency about its use of stereotypes and its play with audience identification and distanciation make it by far the most interesting British 'propaganda' film of the period.

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