EP23 - The 49th Parallel

Michael Powell was thirty-four when the Second World War broke out and changed the trajectory of his career. By then he had already collaborated with Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who had UFA screenwriting experience before the Nuremberg Laws forced him out of Nazi Germany. When the Ministry of Information was formed to crank out narrative propaganda films for the Allied War effort, Powell and Pressburger undertook a high octane war thriller written right on MoI lines in record time. Shot almost entirely in Canada and starring possibly the two most famous British Movie Stars of the 1940’s, The 49th Parallel showcased the grave difference in Nazi and Canadian values, dileneated problematic racial lines, and didn’t pull any punches in ideology. Works Cited Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards. Britain Can Take it: The British Cinema in the Second World War. Basil Blackwell. Oxford. 1986. Robert Murphy. Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-1949. Routledge. London and New York. 1989. Andrew Moor. Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces. I.B. Tauris. London. 2005 Learn more about uboats at uboat.net Find Rozalind MacPhail at www.rozalindmacphail.com