by Brendan Foley
Emperor of the North is a lean, mean little bullet of a film, as stripped down and perfect in its simplicity as any of our beloved Mad Max films. Released and ignored in 1973, Robert Aldrich’s epic parable of man versus institution continues to be underappreciated to this day, a status that will hopefully change now that Twilight Time is bringing the film to Blu-ray.
With America trapped in the depths of the Depression, two rival communities have begun to form. There are the hobos, riding the trains from town to town and state to state, hoping they might finally find some kind of refuge; and then there are the railway men, dedicated to stopping those hobos from taking up space on the trains.
Of all the railway men, there is one who is feared above all others. Stack (Ernest Borgnine) is a sadistic monster, a man whose uniform allows him to kill and maim at his own pleasure (and pleasure is what he takes, as Borgnine’s performance makes clear). And of all the hobos, there’s one that is revered as the king of the train-hoppers, A-№1 (Lee Marvin). When a young, impetuous (re: asshole) hobo named Cigaret (Keith Carradine) causes trouble, it forces A-№1 and Stack into a deadly contest.
And that’s pretty much it, so far as plot goes. Lee Marvin tries to ride Ernest Borgnine’s train, and Ernest Borgnine does his damnedest to murder the shit out of Lee Marvin before he can make it to the end of the line.
By 1973, both Borgnine and Marvin had been around the block a couple dozen times, and their faces show every line of life and woe that either man experienced. You could probably do a passable remake of this film nowadays, but no Hollywood actor alive exudes the kind of unforced, “I Will Fuck You Up and Not Even Blink” macho charisma that these two exuded with next to no effort.
And Aldrich knew perfectly how to use that aspect of his leads for this film. Borgnine could play cuddly figures of paternal warmth (as he did in Aldrich’s earlier The Dirty Dozen), but here he embraces the malevolent glee of Stack, making his villain all the more terrifying for the genuine spark of mania in his eyes as he pulls a fucking Mjolnir-sized mallet out of his belt and sinks it into unfortunate hobo skulls.
For his part, Marvin is right in his familiar wheelhouse, playing the hardest of hard asses. The thing that always set Marvin apart from his peers, though, was the aura of genuine meanness that seemed to ooze out of his pores. Unlike the other legendary badasses of yesteryear (or, uh, present-year) nothing in Marvin’s persona suggested that he had a heart-of-gold or was fighting for any noble cause. Marvin fights because he likes to fight, because he can, because there’s someone telling him not to and that makes the doing that much more fun.
In Emperor of the North and The Dirty Dozen, Aldirch tapped into that almost-nihilistic mean streak and elevated Marvin into a trickster figure, a man who sows chaos wherever he goes because, well, why not? There’s a great bit in Emperor of the North where Marvin is chased by a cop into a hobo camp and, instead of just hiding, or even just intimidating the chump, Marvin just starts fucking with the poor guy and screwing with his head, before reversing courses and acting all buddy-buddy, which is waaaaaay scarier.
Another thing that would be lost if they were to try and update today: authentic train shots. Something about action on trains in old movies always puts me on the edge of my seat, probably because there’s so little room for error. Watching actual men running on top of and climbing around actual, moving trains that are trucking at high speeds, it keeps you tense even during scenes where nothing much is happening. Marvin, Borgnine, and Carradine really throw themselves into the physicality of the film, putting their bodies on the line and taking very real-looking punishment as Stack and A-№1’s battle soldiers on.
By the final climatic confrontation, both men are more staggering than actually fighting. Aldrich, one of America’s unsung masters, openly discussed how he intended the film to be a parable about the individual battling the establishment (not unlike Dirty Dozen or his Longest Yard) and what each of those films makes clear is that such wars are not lightly waged. A-№1 suffers grievous damage to prove a point, and there might not even be a point to prove. There’s nothing to be won or gained by doing what he’s doing, except being able to say he did it.
Is that worth it? Pay attention to the earlier scene where A-№1 explains to Cigaret what “Emperor of the North Pole” means, and you’ll have your answer.
Do yourself a favor and seek out Emperor of the North. The new Blu from Twilight Time is gorgeous, restoring the image and sound to vibrancy without losing the grain so intrinsic to ’70s cinema. In telling the story of two men locked into a cycle of combat, Aldrich created a parable for the ages, one that is every bit as bloody a good time today as it was in 1973. Audiences in those days didn’t realize what they had. Don’t make their mistake again.