The film stars, in order of billing, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Raymond Massey, Anton Walbrook, Eric Portman “and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams”, which gets an above-the-title credit – as well it should. Vaughan Williams’ score is an integral part of the picture and, if not especially Canadian (save for a very short evocation of Calixa Lavallée’s “O Canada” right at the beginning), accompanies the country’s physical landscape beautifully, particularly in the opening travelogue, mostly shot by Freddie Young leaning out of a plane with a hand-held camera and edited back in England by David Lean. (Lean and Young, of course, subsequently worked together on Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter.) And, if you’re thinking that (with one exception) none of these participants seems terribly Canuck, well, if it’s any consolation, the English also get to play all the Nazis, too. The Canadians are largely relegated to small roles and extras – like the real seamen who play the survivors of the Canadian ship torpedoed in the Gulf of St Lawrence at the opening of the picture. “So,” pronounces the German U-boat commander, “the curtain rises on Canada.”
U-37 decides to flee to Hudson’s Bay to evade the RCAF and RCN patrols looking for it. Six Germans are put ashore to scout for supplies. But, even as they set foot on land, they hear the swoop of planes and look back to see Canadian bombers destroying their submarine. In order to lend verisimilitude to the scene, Michael Powell destroyed a real – or real-ish – sub, built for him in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The RCAF gave him two thousand-pound bombs to make it look good, and he put them on “U-37” and was cunning enough to neglect to tell the actors, lest it made them nervous. The sub was then towed to the Strait of Belle Isle between Labrador and Newfoundland to be blown sky high. That was Powell’s only mistake. Notwithstanding that he named the film after Canada’s southern border, the director’s grip on the country’s eastern border was a little hazier. He had forgotten that Newfoundland was not (yet) in Canada but was a British possession in its own right. So HM Customs impounded “U-37” and Powell had to go directly to the Governor to get it back.
Other than that, he and Pressburger didn’t put a foot wrong. The location footage was impressive in its day, and still striking in ours; Pressburger’s script is subtle and humane; and the episodic structure allows for plenty of variety. Following the loss of U-37, the six Germans are now beached in northern Canada and have to figure out a way to get to safe, neutral America. They make their way to a Hudson’s Bay trading post, where the factor (played by the great Scots actor Finlay Currie) is welcoming back an old friend who’s spent the last eleven months hunting in the wilds and so has no idea Canada is at war. Johnny is a French-Canadian trapper played by – who else? – Laurence Olivier. We first meet him in the bath tub singing “Alouette”, and, as often with Olivier, the attention to detail on the accent is so good that it becomes oddly intrusive: “Diss is one big country, but verra few pipple. Ever-wan know ever-body. You can’t make goosestep trew it widdout da police fine out,” he tells the senior German officer (Eric Portman).
The window shot Michael Powell uses to get the Nazis into the factor’s small cabin is cool and clinical and all the more chilling for it. The six Germans enter and announce that they’re now in control. When you’ve just come in off the tundra after eleven months and you want to have a soak in the tub and unwind, the Master Race showing up is a bit of a downer. “Okay, you are German. Why yell about it? I am Canadian,” says the Frenchie. “He is Canadian” – he points to the Scots factor – “and he is Canadian” – and to the smiling eskimo lad: French, English and Inuit all with the same unhyphenated label “Canadian”. That’s a lot simpler than the fractious diversity at Parliament Hill earlier today.
The Nazi lieutenant attempts to beguile his captives with a copy of Mein Kampf, but Trapper Johnny isn’t interested. “What’s the matter with Negroes?” he asks.
“They’re semi-apes,” explains the German. “One step above the Jews.” This is something of a remote concern at a Hudson’s Bay trading post. The Nazis seems as enraged by their prisoners’ geniality as by anything else. As they depart, one tears a portrait of the King and Queen off the wall and carves a swastika into the space.
Pressburger’s plot follows as you’d expect: There are six Germans, and soon there will be five, and then four, three, two… From Hudson’s Bay, they commandeer a seaplane that crashes near a Hutterite community in Manitoba, where a young pre-Mary Poppins Glynis Johns is sweetly trusting of them. They make their way to Indian Day in Banff National Park, for a rather Hitchcockian scene, and thence to a camp in the Rockies, where an arty pacifist (Leslie Howard) is discoursing on Thomas Mann. The tone is set by Olivier’s Frenchie coming in from the bush: He may not be interested in war, and nor is Glynis Johns or Leslie Howard. But war is interested in them. This was the purpose of the film, as the British Ministry of Information saw it: That’s why they wanted it set in Canada, rather than in, say, England, across the Channel from Occupied Europe. These trappers, Hutterites, and pacifists didn’t come looking for trouble. But, even five thousand miles from the fighting, trouble came looking for them – in big, empty, peaceable Canada. And the implicit message to America was: In the end, it will come for you, too. There is no 49th Parallel. Whichever side of it you’re on, it’s the same side.
