Uncanny and quite
spirited; No petition
to make the sequel?

[ It's like a petition-mill out there! With this and this and this and also that! ]

The bold choice to make the doomed nazis the main characters gives the film something of a melodramatic, badge-on-your-sleeve rah-rah, as their forced out of safehouse after safehouse. And it should. It was originally conceived as straight up propoganda meant to incite U.S. involvement in World War II. And as its brand of cinema, it's impeccable, drawing in famous names - Laurence Olivier (as the trapper with a broad, hilarious French accent), Raymond Massey (as the lazy soldier), Leslie Howard (as a writer called a coward), Anton Walbrook (as the religious figure), Glynis Johns (the innocence of a child) -  who toss heroism into our laps like an electric coil of enthusiasm as they attempt to kill, outmoralize, kill, kill and kill. Beyond its political means, 49th Parallel is also a great work of entertainment, skipping along at a snap-quick pace, wearing both the adventure hat and the war hat but, also, staging some fine ironies.

I think my biggest problem, articulated better upon second eyeful, is that Theo appears to be looking at everything (the world, it's decay, et al) with a fresh horror, as if he's just now noticing it. It's like for-your-benefit syndrome on sitcoms: Two characters will enter, mid-sentence, having the beginning of a discussion they would more likely have had on the way home. I still feel like it's an expository buzzkill, dripping with what I expect to be long passages of whole paragraphs from the book far too often (Michael Caine, however awesome, is the biggest offender); There's too much telling, although there's a good deal of showing and some of it pretty subtle to boot. Lack of confidence? Hardly. The creepy, post-apocalyptica mileau trumps all.