Criterion

by Lons

 

Trevor Howard in Green for Danger

The two murders at the heart of Green for Danger make very little practical sense.  So perhaps Scotland Yard's Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) can be forgiven in taking a while to make his way around to the correct culprit. 
 
Called out to a military hospital in the midst of the Nazi air raids, Cockrill seems fairly certain of himself right off the bat.  He graciously allows his prime suspects, an assemblage of doctors and nurses intimately involved in the deaths of a patient and a fellow heath provider, some time to think up a proper alibi, and then critiques their testimonials for poise.  Sim's performance is all in the eyebrows - wide-open at the outset, eager to solve another easy case, and gradually sinking lower and lower down his face as he realizes some rural-type has gotten the better of him.
 
Writer/director Sidney Gilliat had penned some screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock, including the similarly ingenious and far-fetched The Lady Vanishes, so he pretty much had the drawing-room-style mystery genre down cold at this point.  Green for Danger presumably was a chance to play around with some of the conventions, to mix things up a bit. 
 
Without giving away too much, I can say that he essentially gives away his twist ending in the title.  He has characters embark on a risky and uncertain medical procedure based on a hunch.  And he has written a lead detective who's rather unlike his cinematic forebearers.  Cockrill certainly has the charming quirks that come with the position (Sim proves himself repeatedly as a gifted physical comedian), but he's awfully clueless for a Scotland Yard detective.  As the punchline to a film-long joke tweaking figures of authority, Cockrill repeatedly guesses wrong and sees his pet theories disintegrate yet he never yields his trademark flippancy or arrogance.  It's a terrific, sly performance with definite echoes in Stephen Fry's detective in Gosford Park. 
 
Gilliat may not have been Robert Altman, exactly, and his film is rather static when all is said and done, but it has a few nice sequences.  Mainly, he steps back and leaves Sim room to explore the sets and run off with pretty much every scene after the dry opening half hour.

 
The 49th Parallel, almost by definition, has a far wider scope.  (It's named after the long border between Canada and the United States - the longest unguarded borderline in the world, we're told ominously at the outset).
 
A propagandistic military thriller about Nazis lost in the Canadian wilderness, Michael Powell's charming and exceptionally dated 1941 film was an attempt to draw Americans into WWII.  In essence, it's a play on the "we've got to fight them over there so we won't end up fighting them here" argument, which all somehow sounds familiar...
 
Well, okay, Powell's film has a lot to say about the war effort and the ideology of what it calls "Hitlerism" beyond sloganeering.  (Although there is some sloganeering to be had).  It's more than just a calculated attempt to convince Americans that they had a horse in this race, but rather an attempt to contrast Nazi and Western ideology in the most comprehensive, incisive manner possible.  Believing (quite correctly, as it turns out) that Nazism makes no practical sense, Powell confronts his Nazis with challenges and then considers how their Fuhrer would have them react.  Invariably, they chose wrong, because their minds have been poisoned by hate.
 
Emeric Pressburger's screenplay opens with six Nazis exiting a U-boat.  They will be the first six German soldiers to set foot on Canadian soil.  The first, they hope, of thousands.  Unfortunately for these jackbooted knaves, their submarine is sank by the brave men of the Canadian Air Force, stranding them on hostile, foreign and exceptionally cold territory.
 
Their adventure will take them through a cross-section of Canadian society, en route to Niagara Falls and the promise of sweet, at-this-point-neutral America.  (Starting to get the picture?)  Think of it as Helmut and Klaus go to White Castle, only instead of burgers, they're seeking political asylum.
 
Their Canadian journey is beautifully shot and Powell puts together a whole raft of fun action sequences and intense close-calls.  Not to mention the joy of having Nazis as your villains in an adventure movie.  Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, but the guys make for some awesome villains.  The coats, the sneers, the ultimate evil of the whole enterprise.  It's very cinematic.
 
But as you'd expect from such a blatant piece of of agenda filmmaking with such an out-of-date agenda, the whole thing plays rather hokey today.  Laurence Olivier truly embarrasses himself in the role of a French-Canadian trapper, with an accent that's somewhere between Terrence and Phillip and the biggest, most stagy mannerisms possible.  You know that scene in Annie Hall where Alvy's listening to the TV comedian do his "funny French routine" and thinking about what a jackass the guy is?  That was me watching this entire scene.  "Oh, Marie, sometime you make me so mad!"
 
Anton Walbrook and Leslie Howard fare better as Canadians unswayed by the sub-Nietzschean rhetoric of Lieutenant Hirth (Eric Portman) who nevertheless extend these Nazi fugitives a kind hand.  That's how people are in Powell's Canada; kind, caring, generous and open to new ideas.  As long as they aren't Hitler's.
 
And that's really what struck me watching 49th Parallel.  How foreign it all was.  The entire Canadian (and, by extension, Allied) viewpoint is based on setting a standard above one's enemy.  Walbrook's character, who leads a religious commune of German immigrants, makes the reasoning explicitly Christian.  Jesus expects you to love and respect all your fellow men, even the evil German ones who want to kill you.  He offers one of the Nazis membership in the commune after the war.
 
Oh, how opinions have changed.  In a modern America in which our President demands that we allow him to torture indiscriminately and hold American citizens without charges or access to lawyers, in which our pundits argue that we should murder foreign leaders and convert their citizenry to Christianity, it's strange to see a film made during the height of war that preaches love, tolerance and fairness.  (Not to mention praising socialist communes and nature writers!)
 
Perhaps because it was made in direct opposition to a conservative ideology, Powell and Pressburger's movie is far more liberal than anything you'd likely see from modern Britain or America.  (It actually expects everybody, not just the poor people, to sacrifice during wartime!)  But though its blatant propagandizing and sentimental, cornpone dialogue may be outmoded, I would hope that its sense of idealism and moral clarity has not truly gone out of style forever.  Powell and Pressburger understood in 1941, in the midst of fighting the Nazis, what Americans are still struggling to learn (in between reruns of "24"): That when you stoop to the level of your enemy, you lose.

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