The 49th Parallel

James Bowman looks at what he calls “Unparalleled Propaganda“–the World War II films of Michael Powell. One of his best (and still not out on DVD in the US) was The 49th Parallel, one of the great films of the Second World War:

The directorial career of Michael Powell, a major retrospective of whose films begins today at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, spanned half a century, but his best and most characteristic movies date from the World War II years and are essentially war propaganda. Yet there has never been such propaganda before or since