Emperor of the North
| Emperor of the North | |
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original film poster
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| Directed by | Robert Aldrich |
| Produced by | Kenneth Hyman Stan Hough |
| Screenplay by | Christopher Knopf |
| Story by | Jack London (uncredited) |
| Starring |
Lee Marvin Ernest Borgnine Keith Carradine |
| Music by | Frank De Vol |
| Cinematography | Joseph F. Biroc |
| Edited by | Michael Luciano |
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Production
company |
Inter-Hemisphere
20th Century Fox |
| Distributed by |
20th Century Fox (USA, theatrical) Fox-MGM (West Germany) ABC USA TV airing |
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Release date
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Running time
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118 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3,705,000 |
| Box office | $2 million (US/ Canada rentals) 251,021 admissions (France) |
Emperor of the North Pole is a 1973 American DeLuxe Color film directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Keith Carradine. It was re-released under the shorter title Emperor of the North, and is best known under the latter name.
The film is about hobos during the 1930s and is set in Oregon. It is based, in part, on the books The Road by Jack London and From Coast to Coast with Jack London by "A-No.-1" (the pen-name of Leon Ray Livingston). However, both books predate the 1930s by a few decades. Carradine's character, Cigaret, uses the moniker that Jack London used on the road, and like London, is portrayed as a young traveling companion to the older A-No.-1 (played by Marvin), but that is where the similarity between Carradine's character and Jack London ends as Cigaret is portrayed in the film as immature, loud-mouthed, and not bright. The title is a reference to a joke among hobos during the Great Depression that the world's best hobo was "Emperor of the North Pole", a way of poking fun at their own desperate situation because somebody ruling over the North Pole would reign over a wasteland.
Shack (Ernest Borgnine) is a merciless, inhumane, and sadistic bully of a conductor on an Oregon railroad during the Great Depression. He takes it upon himself to ensure that no one would ever ride his freight train for free, and that anyone who has would no longer live. Shack has an arsenal of makeshift weapons: a hammer, a steel rod, and a chain. During the opening credits, he hits a hobo who is riding between two cars on the head, causing the "bo" to fall on the tracks and be cut in two by the train's wheels.
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Wikipedia