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How I felt about it. Obviously a propaganda film, 49th Parallel was partly funded by the British government, and was intended to inspire Canadians (and Americans) to action against their bitter enemies, the belligerent and powerful Germans.
Our six Nazis are complete anti-heroes. Only one shows any compassion toward others, and naturally, he is soon outcast by the other German soldiers. The 'good' Nazi is symbolic that Nazis, and not Germans, are bad.
The point is further emphasized when the soldiers briefly join a commune of German heritage, and are informed in no short order that their Nazi ways are not welcome, and that German immigrants are Canadians, first and foremost.
Look for a very young Glynis Johns as a teenaged German-Canadian lass.
The stubborn and stupid Nazis never seem to learn that all the Canadians they meet are of the same mind, despite their diverse backgrounds. They're Good Samaritans, who assume that strangers are friends, but when they learn the truth about Nazis, they courageously resist. In two instances, they even get to beat up Nazi soldiers, in a fair fight, of course. The punches, however, take place off camera, so as not to evoke sympathy for our fascist anti-heroes.
The Nazis even hate art! Can you imagine? And they bicker, and are incompetent. Some master race, huh?
The film becomes an adaptation of Ten Little Indians, only there are six to start with. Canadian pluck and fortitude picks off one Nazi after another, until just one is left. Naturally, he's the most hardened Nazi of them all.
The Nazis really were horrible, of course, and England didn't even know the worst of it in 1941, that they were about to exterminate millions of people in concentration camps simply due to religion or genetics.
Still, there's irony in portraying Nazis as killers of unarmed women and children. The United States, for example, killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese noncombatants in 1945 alone, bombing to shreds one large Japanese city after another to terrorize the Japanese into surrender. Which the Japan government waited far too long to do, and yes, they started the war.
Back to the movie. It almost works as a comedy, particularly when Olivier plays a thickly accented and devoutly Catholic French-Canadian trapper. He would be fighting the French in a pending project, a version of Shakespeare's Henry V. And you'll roll your eyes when lily-gloved Leslie Howard, despite being shot in the hip, beats up (off camera) a cornered Nazi half his age. It was one of Howard's last roles, he was shot down by the Germans in 1943.