The Criterion Collection saw fit to release this 1941 British propaganda film in an elaborate two-disc set, but the circumstances behind the production are actually more interesting than the resulting film showcased in a fine print on the 2007 disc. In their third collaboration, director Michael Powell and screenwriter Eric Pressburger were requested by the British Government's Ministry of Information to make a movie that would encourage the U.S. to join the Allied forces to defeat the Nazis, all this months prior to Pearl Harbor. As it stands, the film serves as a piercing if somewhat dogmatic indictment of the absolutist Nazi rhetoric and the simple-minded brutality borne out of it. The title refers to the border between the U.S. and Canada, which is immediately identified by the narrator as "the only undefended frontier in the world".
Enter a German U-boat, which gets sunk in Canadian waters, while six Nazi soldiers look for food and supplies on land. Suddenly stranded in a country not only alien to them but also hostile to their point of view, the rest of the plot is about how these men attempt to find a way to get out of Canada and back to Germany. They make their way westward meeting various people who react to their presence in divergent ways. The film's most intriguing and challenging aspect is how the soldiers are presented in various shades of fanaticism from the uncompromising zealot, Lieutenant Hirth, to the passive resistance of Vogel, who wants to abandon the cause to become a baker. The episodic structure accommodates several famous stars in condensed roles, the most familiar being Laurence Olivier as a French-Canadian fur-trapper and Leslie Howard as a reclusive aesthete. Olivier's cameo is particularly shameless with an overripe accent that portends the hamminess of his twilight career roles, while Howard's has a touch of ironic poignancy given his death from a German fighter attack soon after production was completed.
The most interesting passage occurs when the soldiers happen upon a Hutterite farming community in Manitoba, an Amish-like oasis of pacifist civility that must have served as the inspiration for Peter Weir's "Witness". Eric Portman plays the soulless Hirth with a barely concealed rage and a wavering Teutonic accent, while Niall MacGinniss subtly shows the inner conflict of a man having doubts about the necessity of a master race. Long before "Mary Poppins" and "While You Were Sleeping", Glynis Johns, all of 17, affectingly plays a naïve Hutterite girl intrigued by the soldiers. There is evidence of Powell's and Pressburger's compelling cinematic style in various shots (like the plane crash sequence), and revered British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams composed the atmospheric score that beautifully underlines much of the action.
For all its good intentions, however, the film is compromised by a narrative that rarely inspires and other than the Nazi portrayals, characters that often seem cardboard-thin. Film historian Bruce Eder provides academic commentary on an alternate track on the first disc, while the second disc consists of three major components. The first is a 46-minute short, "The Volunteer", starring Ralph Richardson as himself as he shows a theater dresser preparing to entering military service. The second is an hour-long audio tape of Powell narrating parts of his autobiography, and the final piece is an entertaining hour-long 1981 documentary about Powell and Pressburger, although unfortunately it bypasses production of this film entirely.
Enter a German U-boat, which gets sunk in Canadian waters, while six Nazi soldiers look for food and supplies on land. Suddenly stranded in a country not only alien to them but also hostile to their point of view, the rest of the plot is about how these men attempt to find a way to get out of Canada and back to Germany. They make their way westward meeting various people who react to their presence in divergent ways. The film's most intriguing and challenging aspect is how the soldiers are presented in various shades of fanaticism from the uncompromising zealot, Lieutenant Hirth, to the passive resistance of Vogel, who wants to abandon the cause to become a baker. The episodic structure accommodates several famous stars in condensed roles, the most familiar being Laurence Olivier as a French-Canadian fur-trapper and Leslie Howard as a reclusive aesthete. Olivier's cameo is particularly shameless with an overripe accent that portends the hamminess of his twilight career roles, while Howard's has a touch of ironic poignancy given his death from a German fighter attack soon after production was completed.
The most interesting passage occurs when the soldiers happen upon a Hutterite farming community in Manitoba, an Amish-like oasis of pacifist civility that must have served as the inspiration for Peter Weir's "Witness". Eric Portman plays the soulless Hirth with a barely concealed rage and a wavering Teutonic accent, while Niall MacGinniss subtly shows the inner conflict of a man having doubts about the necessity of a master race. Long before "Mary Poppins" and "While You Were Sleeping", Glynis Johns, all of 17, affectingly plays a naïve Hutterite girl intrigued by the soldiers. There is evidence of Powell's and Pressburger's compelling cinematic style in various shots (like the plane crash sequence), and revered British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams composed the atmospheric score that beautifully underlines much of the action.
For all its good intentions, however, the film is compromised by a narrative that rarely inspires and other than the Nazi portrayals, characters that often seem cardboard-thin. Film historian Bruce Eder provides academic commentary on an alternate track on the first disc, while the second disc consists of three major components. The first is a 46-minute short, "The Volunteer", starring Ralph Richardson as himself as he shows a theater dresser preparing to entering military service. The second is an hour-long audio tape of Powell narrating parts of his autobiography, and the final piece is an entertaining hour-long 1981 documentary about Powell and Pressburger, although unfortunately it bypasses production of this film entirely.