49th Parallel (1941) on Netflix
A German submarine sinks a Canadian freighter and hides in Hudson Bay. Lieutenant Ernst Hirth leads the shore party that bombers strand, and he plans to reach the neutral United States.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.3/108,612 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
U-37 is the first German submarine to reach Canadian waters. It sinks a freighter in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and takes shelter in Hudson Bay. Captain Bernsdorff sends six men ashore for food and fuel: Lieutenant Ernst Hirth, his deputy Kuhnecke, and the crewmen Vogel, Kranz, Lohrmann and Jahner. While the party is on land, bombers destroy the U-boat, and the men are stranded. At a Hudson Bay Company trading post they find the Factor and Johnnie Barras, a French-Canadian trapper who has been away in the wild for close to a year. Hirth, eager but inexperienced, follows his orders and decides to take the group south to the neutral United States rather than be captured.
Cast
- Richard Georgeas Kommandant Bernsdorff
- Peter Mooreas Kranz
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about 49th Parallel (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The replica U-boat U-37 built for the film carried two 1,000-pound bombs supplied by the Royal Canadian Air Force. Director Michael Powell did not tell the actors the bombs were aboard so they would not be nervous, and they were replaced by dummies before detonation.
- Elisabeth Bergner was originally cast as Anna but deserted the film, refusing to return to Britain for the studio scenes because, as an Austrian, she feared for her life if the Nazis invaded. Glynis Johns replaced her, though wide location shots of Bergner were salvaged.
- Actor Lovell nearly drowned filming the scene in which the commandeered floatplane crashes: the plane sank faster than expected, and a stink bomb thrown in to heighten the turmoil added to the chaos. A member of the camera crew jumped in and saved him.
- American censors cut 19 minutes from the film, including a speech by its fanatical Nazi commander claiming Eskimos are like Negros and were "semi-apes, only one degree above the Jews". The material was removed to avoid offending segregationists in the American South.
- The film was budgeted at £68,000 but cost £132,000, with the government providing less than £60,000. Elisabeth Bergner's departure, Laurence Olivier and Raymond Massey nearly pulling out, and the overruns nearly canceled the film until J. Arthur Rank stepped in with additional funding.
- The film is the only time Canadian-born Raymond Massey played a Canadian on screen. His brother Vincent, then Canada's High Commissioner to Great Britain and a future Governor General, persuaded him to take the part and also supplied the opening narration, uncredited.
- The men in the lifeboat at the start of the film were mainly local merchant seamen, many of whom had already been torpedoed.
