It was conceived by the British Ministry of Information as a propaganda picture. Yet 49th Parallel is hardly a parochial Canadian film. This was the only identifiably Canadian role for the Canadian actor best known for portraying Abraham Lincoln. Vincent Massey, the High Commissioner to the United Kingdom (and future Governor General), reads the prologue while his younger brother, actor Raymond Massey, plays Andy Brock (a perfect Canadian warrior name) in the final scenes. The picture also takes in a vast human geography, including in the cast French-Canadian, Inuit, Scottish, English, native, and German characters. While the 49th parallel is often thought of as the border between the US and Canada, around 72 of Canadians live below it, and Seattle, WA. The majority of the population of the USAвЂ™s northern neighbor actually live south of a major US city. We are treated to scenes of wheat harvesting, the Three Sisters peaks on the approach to Banff, and a Rocky Mountain lake. The 49th parallel the majority of Canadians live south of Seattle. The film's plot takes it from the Gulf of St Lawrence to Hudson Bay to Winnipeg, across the Prairies to Banff and the Rockies and finally to Niagara Falls.

Part of the pleasure for a Canadian in watching 49th Parallel is that it serves as a travelogue of the Canada of the early 1940s. Fortunately, it overcame this temptation, and is now discussed alongside other superior wartime propaganda films like In Which We Serve (Noel Coward and David Lean, 1942) and Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943). Faced with this difficulty, it would have been easy for 49th Parallel to become a shrill exercise in jingoism. This was no easy task as the war in 1940 (when filming began) seemed very far away. The film 49th Parallel is one of the most identifiably 'Canadian' of movies but, interestingly, it was written by a Hungarian (Emeric Pressburger), directed by an Englishman (Michael Powell), and aimed at the then-neutral Americans, encouraging them to join in the fight against Nazi Germany. The anniversary provides a good excuse to enjoy the film as a work of art and assess its historical value as a work of propaganda made during a war. The year 2016 marks the 75th anniversary of the 1941 release of Canada's signal contribution to the propaganda films of early World War II- 49th Parallel. If truth is the first casualty of war, then the emphasis of propaganda inevitably shifts to the convincing rather than the truthful side of things. The world wars of the twentieth century changed that. Although it has taken on a pejorative tone, 'propaganda' used to be a neutral term describing the way in which large numbers of people were convinced about certain truths. What happens, then, when there are not yet any winners or losers, only combatants? In the early part of World War II, the combatants used film to craft a version of reality which we now call propaganda.

It has been said that history is written by the victors.