"49th PARALLEL"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 144, 27 March 1942, Page 14

"49th PARALLEL"

Advance Notes On A Film With A History

(Written for "The Listener" by

E. S.

ANDREWS

on both sides of the Atlantic, the Gaumont British production, 49th Parallel has come to New Zealand with a surprising lack of fuss-though if G.M. will pardon the brief intrusion into his line of business, I myself think that the fuss will be made soon enough by audiences clamouring to see it. I remember the picture when it was little a film so much gossiped about

more than a gleam in the eye of Canada’s newly-appointed Film Commissioner, John Grierson, in the early months of the war. Grierson (then visiting New Zealand) spoke of Canada with a deep affection; of its size and its variety and of its upstanding diversity of peoples. His imagination had seized upon the romantic and practical implications of the great

unfortified border-line ‘stretching right across the North American Continent between the United States and Canada -the 49th parallel. He, being what he was, was dead-set to make a film about it. Largely, I think, through his in. fluence, the Films Division of the British Ministry of Information was persuaded to put up an initial £25,000, and the job was soon under way. re FOR a government department to subsidise commercial film production was not entirely without precedent, but money as big as this is real money, and the proposal did not escape criticism. In its own words, the House of Com--mons Select Committee on National Expenditure, then (1940) distrustful of any expenditure on intangibles like propaganda, regarded "this kind of venture with the gravest misgivings." But troubles did not begin or end there. The Aus-trian-born Elisabeth Bergner, well-known for her sensitive and moving acting under the direction of her husband Paul Czinner, was chosen to play in the film, and actually set off for Canada to do location work. By this time a great deal of energy, money, and film had been expended and nobody was made any the happier when Bergner, for reasons of her own, refused to return from Hollywood to England to complete studio scenes. What really caused the hitch I cannot guess from the press controversy which raged at the time. But hitch there was, and it held up production and ran up costs. I have long been a Bergner admirer, but I freely admit that the substitute, Glynis Johns, has done as good a job for the film as Bergner could have done. x * * HE story of the film is credited to E. Pressburger and Michael Powell, and those fortunates who have read Powell’s 200,000 Feet on Foula and have also a sense of style will quickly realise when they see the film that, so far as the dialogue is concerned, the story credits are given in the right order, with Powell a very belated second in a field of two. As a one-time film critic I am brazen enough to confess that I do not know E. Pressburger, but he obviously knows his stuff. Powell, to judge by his book, is the complete extrovert, with a disarming frankness of statement which’ does not stop short of naive description of his girl-friend Frankie, or open and near-libellous criticism of his cameraman, all done in the most big-hearted fashion. He is not, I think, the author of much of the pungent dialogue of 49th Parallel. For that matter, if everybody got his due, I should guess that the most striking patch of talk in the whole film owes more to Grierson than to the Pressburger-Powell combination. % a a OWEVER, writing dialogue is not Powell’s job; production’ and direction of films is his business, and 49th Parallel puts him straightway into the top class. He made Edge of the World, a film which, falling a little short of box office success, was a real succes d’estimé, a prestige picture still much talked about among the knowledgeable. The difference is that Edge of the World tended to be a coterie picture, whereas 49th Parallel is going to hit the great mass of its

audiences just where they like it most. Powell has that rarest of all gifts among directors — the ability to define and emphasise a mood in outdoor location shots without dragging the scenery in by the scruff of its neck. When his characters walk out of a door one feels at once that they walk into a real world of hills and roads and trees stretching all across the globe, instead of those interminable clausetrophobic plaster walls and lacquered floors. The broad sweep of the Canadian scene seems only to have enlarged his talents in that direction. I haven’t seen anything like it for plein-air atmosphere and tension since John Ford made Stage Coach; and that’s getting to be ancient history as movies go.