49th Parallel

Steyn Online ^ | 30 June 2018 | Mark Steyn

[Rummyfan]

Mark is away, so this week's movie date is an encore presentation for Dominion Day weekend, first published last year on Justin Trudeau's fiasco of a sesquicentennial:

On my native land's birthday, we surely ought to have a film on a Canadian theme. But what to choose? We used Denys Arcand's valentine to socialized health care for St-Jean-Baptiste Day. So I toyed with David Cronenberg's Crash, a film about, um, auto-eroticism in which everyone gets sexually aroused by multiple-car pile-ups on the QEW, which I've always assumed is some kind of metaphor for multiculturalism. Or perhaps John Greyson's Zero Patience, the first Canadian Aids musical, in which the Quebec air steward credited as the man who spread HIV across North American meets the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and their singing bottoms perform a duet together, which I also assumed was some kind of metaphor for multiculturalism.

But in the end, on a day when, unlike Charles and Justin and Bono and apparently everyone else, I'm in a mood to look back at the past, I thought I'd pick a movie that nicely complements our Song of the Week. Whereas the story of "O Canada" manages to pull in a lot of anglo-franco history from the 19th and early 20th century, this film is a snapshot of the Dominion at a crucial point in its history - the beginning of the Second World War. 49th Parallel takes its title from the very border between Canada and America.

[Rummyfan]

French-Canadian trapper Laurence Olivier finds himself cornered by Nazis in 49th Parallel

I actually caught this on TCM last week. Good flick.

[MAexile]

https://youtu.be/g0pWTFean0E

[DesertRhino]

49th Parallel is a great movie. The Canada that was...and hopefully is still out there somewhere.

[Peter Libra]

I remember the film as a child in England 1941. Eric Portman as the swinish Nazi, the U Boat commander. The film was meant (it was claimed) to boost support for the war, in Canada. A "good" German was created, he was a crew member and stumbled into a religious commune in Western Canada. He gives himself up and the people there invite him back after the war.

Clever stuff. The scene at the tourist park where everyone is urged to stare at the next person is still with me. Fugitive Nazis sweating it out.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Excellent film. Only time Raymond Massey ever played a Canadian character.

[miss marmelstein]

Plot Point Alert!!!

Much better movie than any of the other modern ones he viewed. Only problem is that Olivier disappears from the film way too early.

[MarMema]

The Canada that was...and hopefully is still out there somewhere.

I spend a bit of time talking with them on various social media and they, believe me, are far superior to us in every way, and do not h4esitate to say so. What is more, amusingly, they will take down our economy by boycotting everything from America in their stores.

I have seen only a few intelligent replies from Canadians on the tariff. The rest are dead set -telling me that our military is useless, our economy about to be destroyed and Trump is, of course, a dictator.

They strike me as no different from liberals here, unable to consider any view point but their own and delusional in their fixed rigid beliefs.

[hardspunned]

One of my favorite movies. The Anton Walbrook monologue gives me chills. The opening credit theme is a beautiful piece of music.