Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941)

Andy Brock: [to Hirth] I can grouse about the food, and the C.O. and anything I blamed please. And that's more than you with your Gestapo and your stormtroopers and your Aryan bourgeoisie. Ahhh, nuts. What's the good of talking to you. You can't even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it.

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Andy Brock: The government says, "We want men to fight the Nazis, join today." So I joined. I figured they were in a hurry. That was three hundred and eighty seven days ago. Four divisions and a lot of drafts have gone overseas, and what's number B987642 doing? Guarding the Chippewa Canal. Who'd want to steal it anyway?

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Lieutenant Hirth: Yes, I am a Nazi. Heil Hitler!

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Esmond Knight was first choice to play Lieutenant Hirth, but he had enlisted in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war.
While some people may think that this film was inspired by Franz von Werra's escape from a Canadian POW camp (as portrayed in The One That Got Away), von Werra wasn't sent to Canada until January 1941 and his escape wasn't reported until he got back to Germany in April 1941. This film was written as Powell & Pressburger went to Canada in late 1940 and production was under way by January 1941. Powell & Pressburger wouldn't have heard about von Werra until the film was almost completed.
All of the opening travelogue was shot by Freddie Young with a handheld camera out the windows of trains, cars and planes.
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