Yesterday I helped fleurdelis28 move stuff between her various apartments. In return, she played me the 1960 D'Oyly Carte Iolanthe, so that you should now expect a post about the Lord Chancellor sometime in the next day or so. That was awesome. I also stayed up to watch the Oscars, which was somewhat less awesome (trans: WTF NO PETER O'TOOLE), not to mention I remembered only some time after the ceremonies had ended that I'd planned to get up early this morning in order to tape 49th Parallel (1941) on TCM. I slept three hours. I got up anyway.

49th Parallel is a strange, strange film. Made in 1940, before Powell and Pressburger amalgamated into the Archers, it's clearly recognizable as a propaganda piece—on the other hand, it's a propaganda piece whose lead characters are six Nazis, the only survivors of a U-boat sunk in Hudson Bay, on the run toward the border of the then-neutral United States. The story progresses across Canada in set-pieces, a trading post, a religious community, a tourist attraction, an academic's camp, as one after another the Nazis are picked off, captured or killed. And then there were none. Did I mention Ralph Vaughan Williams did the music?

I can only imagine the rules that 49th Parallel broke in its choice of protagonists, although I will admit I wouldn't have expected anything less from the men who would later create The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Eric Portman is Leutnant Ernst Hirth, the kind of blindly brittle idealist, as self-righteous as he is inexperienced, who would have been fragged by his own men in Vietnam; demonstrably neither unintelligent nor unresourceful, he is nonetheless so locked into his own ideologies that watching him interact outside his accustomed hierarchy is painful. It's mentioned once that he was a latecomer to the Nazi Party in 1936, as opposed to his commander who was there from the beginning in 1930, and indeed he has all the desperate fervency of a convert—the others can pass for ordinary Canadian citizens, but Hirth must present himself as the perfect Aryan superman, and it's really this inability to keep his head down and his mouth shut that dooms the party in the end. But there's humanity in that, and therefore the character is chilling where he might otherwise have been cardboard. He's dangerous not because he's some cold, inhuman machine, but because he's a bright, efficient, arrogant man who believes.* Likewise one of the crewmen, Vogel (Niall MacGinnis), who was a baker before the war and would much rather be punching dough than shooting civilians and tearing down pictures of the Queen; he folds a rosary under a dead man's hands and sees a girl safe home against orders, and his resigned obedience to Nazism is perhaps more disturbing than Hirth's dogmatic bluster, because Vogel at least knows there are other ways to live. "What can you do? When you're a boy, you like playing soldiers. When you're a young man, you can't get work unless you belong to them." These are neither comic cartoons nor monsters, and their position as viewpoint characters, hunted, outnumbered, moreover forces us to identify with them, no matter how many deaths are on their hands.

As for the rest of the cast, Laurence Olivier as the Québécois trapper Johnnie devours the scenery alive and spits out the splinters; his boisterous hamming it up might have come in under the wire as a character who lives with the volume turned up to eleven, but his accent so reminded me of Inspector Clouseau that I found it almost impossible to take him seriously. Leslie Howard fares rather better as Philip Armstrong Scott, a cheerfully comfortable anthropologist who takes art treasures along for company in the Rockies and checks himself curiously for physical indicators of fear as he's being tied up, even if he gets a little two-fisted toward the end. Raymond Massey plays a positive character for once as Andy Brock, a deserter-by-default who has overstayed his leave by eight days, fed up with guarding the Chippewa Canal—"Who'd want to steal it, anyway?"—when he hoped to be posted overseas. And Anton Walbrook continues to be impressive as the leader of a community of Hutterites whom the Nazis stumble across and mistake for like-minded émigrés: he is not flashy, and his speech has none of the fiery rhetoric with which Hirth invokes the new order of Nazism and the ancient loyalty which all blood Germans owe to their Führer and themselves, but he's quietly, reliably convincing as a man who has no interest in race or country or appeals to nationalism, only in what people do with their lives; and of what people like Hirth are doing, he doesn't approve.

The film is episodic, and this is not in its favor. The constant zigzagging across the provinces feels weirdly like a wartime travelogue, and the major encounters start to resemble Socratic dialogues as time and time again Nazi propaganda runs up against obstinate Canadian decency, but some of the smaller scenes are great. There's one beautiful, paranoid sequence during Indian Day in Banff that might have been scripted by Hitchcock, as a Mountie interrupts the festivities to read out a compiled police description of the three Nazis who are at that moment attempting to camouflage themselves in the crowd. "Look closely at your neighbors . . ." As each detail is broadcast, the camera tightens in on the faces of the three men, one of whom, perhaps even the wire-taut Hirth, will break not from the scrutiny but from the suspense, and it's a brilliantly perverse pull of sympathy for the Nazis. Another scene has them in Winnipeg after days of tramping the roads, penniless, staring miserably through restaurant windows at all the food they haven't been eating and can't afford, until one of the younger crewmen has the bright idea of selling Hirth's field glasses to buy hot dogs: but he's been in such a boil of suppressed fury that neither they nor the audience can tell whether he's going to lose it right there in the automat (thereby blowing their cover) until he bites into the hot dog, awards one of his rare smiles, and asks how much they got for the binoculars. And the seaplane crash is a nail-biter—the pilot has not logged so many hours' flight time; Hirth, true control freak that he is, won't stop being a back seat driver; and there are trees coming up fast.

So I wouldn't call 49th Parallel one of the masterpieces of the Archers' career, although I see that it won Emeric Pressburger an Oscar for Best Original Story in 1943 and nominations that same year for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. It's more of a conventional war movie than anything else I've seen from them, and yet it doesn't quite fit into any of its conventions, which may account for the disjointed feel: it has too many elbows, or eyebrows, or something. (It has Laurence Olivier's accent.) But I'm glad to have seen the movie, and now I can wait to compare it with One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). But first I should do laundry.

*He exists on the same character spectrum as M*A*S*H's Frank Burns, I realized—the fanatical subordinate that every superior officer dreads, the one who not only knows all the rules and regulations better than you, he actually believes the stuff. But as the archetypal martinet, Major Burns was played almost exclusively for laughs, and there's nothing funny about Leutnant Hirth. He's not incompetent. He's not a coward. Yes, the finale delivers him the comeuppance that a wartime audience must have waited to see, but he comes within a checklist's breadth of success. This is not the kind of propaganda film meant to leave you reassured that good old British (or Canadian) spirit will carry the day. You don't get to sit back and relax. Instead we have met the enemy and, you know, they are kind of scary.