YMMV / 49th Parallel

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • German Token Good Teammate Vogel has a secondary role but is easily the source of some of the film's most iconic and intriguing moments.
  • Johnny, the Too Good for This Sinful Earth Hunter Trapper played by a Playing Against Type Laurence Olivier and Andy Brock (who gives Hirth his Karma Houdini Warranty) each only appears in a brief section of the film but are among the best-liked characters.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans would prefer to ignore the death of Vogel, due to the tragedy of his Heel–Face Door-Slam and how it can feel like an Ass Pull that his comrades both take the time to execute him in a formal manner and are able to do so without anyone stopping them.
• Spiritual Predecessor:
  • This film along with the Errol Flynn film Northern Pursuit can considered to be Cliffhanger except set in WWII Canada with the Nazis being the invaders rather than Treasury robbers, as they have a premise about a small Dwindling Party of terrorists stranded on a snowy mountainous terrain (which gets a dose of Scenery Porn) and trying to escape, while in the process being the Hate Sink group for their countless acts of Kick the Dog cruelty to a point the audience would cheer for The Hero to put a stop to them. Hirth's actor Eric Portman even bares some physical facial resemblance to John Lithgow, who plays the Big Bad of Cliffhanger Quelen who shares the same first name Eric with Portman, while presenting himself as an Evil Brit much like how Portman is a British actor despite playing a German. In addition, the plot similarities include the villains suffering a plane crash at the beginning which result in the death of the pilot (Kuhnecke in this film, Mike in Cliffhanger), the sole remaining henchman selfishly turning against his leader after having enough of his bad leadership skills that led to his downfall (Lohrmann in this film, Travers in Cliffhanger) and finally the main villain at the end getting his at a mountainside by being at the receiving end of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by a heroic underdog service character (Hirth getting pummeled by Canadian soldier Andy Brock in a train car as the goes back to Canada as it pass by the mountains on a bridge, while Quelen is defeated by Sylvester Stallone as a mountain ranger in a brawl and falls to his death in a Hellish Copter from the mountain cliffside).
  • Interestingly enough, Portman would later play a U-boat officer again in The Bedford Incident, which would be the closest thing to a spiritual sequel to this film, only this time to be set during the Cold War, with Portman's character to be a former Kreigsmarine officer-turned-NATO adviser. It is as though in the film, Hirth, after getting captured and imprisoned by the Allies at the end of this film, gets pardoned after the war, only to be Demoted to Extra in contrast to his leading role in this movie, but pulled a Heel–Face Turn (which can double as Redemption Demotion) following the fall of the Third Reich, helping the government that was once his enemy and having become Older and Wiser unlike before when he was rash and blindly fanatical.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Kuhnecke, an early Nazi Party member capable of more Pragmatic Villainy than Hirth, is a chilling but multidimensional antagonist, but he dies less than halfway through the film, before meeting Scott or the Hutterites.