Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

evanston_dad This odd and fascinating movie was nominated for 3 Oscars at the 1942 Academy Awards under its American release title, "The Invaders": Outstanding Motion Picture (Ortus), Best Motion Picture Story (Emeric Pressburger) and Best Screenplay (Rodney Ackland and Emeric Pressburger). Pressburger won the award for Motion Picture Story, the only Oscar of his career.The film is a cautionary message to North America about the danger of staying ambivalent about the threat of Nazi Germany. A crew of Nazi U boat personnel are stranded in Canada after their submarine is sunk by British planes. They then embark on an episodic journey across the Canadian wilderness as they try to figure out how to get out of the country and back to their motherland. Along the way, they come across situation after situation that challenges the Nazi premise and causes the crew to gradually unravel.The film is really a series of vignettes, each featuring a well-known star at its center -- including Laurence Olivier (hilarious as a French-Canadian trapper), Leslie Howard and Raymond Massey. It's a unique and engrossing film, full of speeches and propaganda yet never feeling preachy or schematic. The team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had a knack for making films set in a reality just a shade or two removed from the reality we all actually know and experience, and "49th Parallel" is no exception.Grade: A

LCShackley In the famed war movie "The Great Escape," a Allied soldiers escape from a prison camp and try to make their way to safety. We cheer them all the way. In "49th Parallel" we have the reverse: a group of six Nazis escapes the destruction of their submarine, and tries to escape through Canada to the USA. Along the way they murder, pillage, and destroy...and we boo them all the way across the continent and back.I was interested in this film because I have been familiar with the Vaughan Williams score for years, but never seen the images it was written for. "49th Parallel" starts slowly, almost like a war documentary. Then we're taken to a far-flung trapper's HQ, where we're forced to watch Laurence Olivier do a Pepe-le-Pew style French character. I almost gave up there, but then the plot started to thicken. Although there are several preachy, propagandistic spots in the film, there's a lot of action and character development as well, with a zinger of an ending. If you can make it through the first 30 minutes, the rest of the movie will reward you for your patience.

Polaris_DiB Earlier Powell and Pressburger (pre-Archers?...?) skit about a bunch of crashed Germans in Canada during WWII, right before the US enters the war. The Germans want to make it to the US border where they'll have political asylum, but first they must get through the vast landscape and 11 million population of not-quite-so-wary Canadians--adversaries that are more happy to listen to their German philosophy with a cock-headed grin and a justifiable democratic argument against their politics than they are trying to stop or kill the group in particular. Yet somehow the group of six Germans quickly falls to five, then four, then three, then two...As a bit of WWII propaganda it has its fallacies. As a survival in enemy territory narrative, it's interesting because you want to see how far they'll go (everyone loves the underdog), but you also want them to get stopped. The Archers mix those contrary conceits very well. And as a character-based war drama, it's a bit too caricaturistic to take too seriously. Everyone has extreme accents, and the lead German has the faint trace of a lisp. Powell and Pressburger do the best when contrasting their hyper-diagonal marching against the curved countryside, and they take a particularly "democratic" stance here--one so democratic, at points it lingers near communism, which the Germans are appropriately appalled at but not all that believably considering their close proximity to this little country called the USSR (perhaps you've heard of it).It's fun seeing these two auteurs get a handle on the type of characters they like and the type of filming they want to do, but later they were to go on to create much more sophisticated, gorgeous, and well-told works that stand out greater in the annals of cinematic history. They would keep such things as the caricatures (the Yank in A Canterbury Tale, the entire figure of Colonel Blimp), international drama (Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death), and love of the countryside (A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life or Death) in much more solid and spectacular narratives. This movie is an early work, and feels it, but it's not quite so bad as their somewhat regrettable I Know Where I'm Going.--PolarisDiB

writers_reign It's unbelievable that Pressburger won a Best Screenplay award for this although it was wartime I suppose and standards went out the window. Seen today it's a rambling, largely incoherent and unrealistic story of Six Nazis In Search Of A Neutral Country. The bizarre casting does little to help and it was clear that the actors with marquee value, Olivier, Massey, Howerd, were never On Call at the same time. Of these Olivier is by far the worst, an acting joke with an accent that would bring a blush to the cheek of Dick Van Dyke. Eric Portman as the Senior Nazi strikes his one note in frame #1 and never deviates from or embellishes it throughout. It probably meant something to someone, somewhere back in 1941 but not to your jaded, cynical correspondent in 2008.