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 — largely because it doesn't look like propaganda.

In 1941's "49th Parallel" (May 21 and 22), a German submarine crew stranded in the Canadian north tries to make its way to the then-neutral United States. Only the leader (Eric Portman) is a committed Nazi, and Powell was criticized for making the rest of the Germans look too human. One of them, played by Niall MacGinnis, even decides to stay in Canada in a community of Hutterite Germans. He is shot for desertion.

Here neither the bad nor the good guys are mere caricatures. Leslie Howard's gentle Canadian author and outdoorsman, who just happens to have a Picasso and a Matisse in his tent in the Rockies, comes close when calmly discussing art and literature with the Nazi, who despises his apparent softness and destroys his "degenerate" artworks. But Howard shows he's no wimp, striking a series of blows: "That's for Picasso," he says, "that's for Matisse; that's for Mann, and that's for me!"

This was early in Powell's wartime career, and rather a crude reaching for cultural contrast that he didn't need later on. By the end of the war his propaganda was much more subtle. Unlike the Nazi or the Soviet varieties, or even America's aggressive promotion of democracy in Frank Capra's "Why We Fight," he has no ideology, not even the ideology of art, and so doesn't overpromise. There is no utopia to fight for.

Or rather, a sort of utopia already exists. It is England with its storied past and its gentle, decent, humorous people. Unlike the more political utopias it is not perfect. Some adjustments will have to be made as a result of the war. But this only makes it more believable, and more cherishable.

All of which begs the question of course: where are the modern equivalents of men like Powell and Michael Curtiz?