Triumph of the Will: When Hollywood Still Had Talent that Could Transcend Their Script: A Review of Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine (Never Mind the Movie!), Part I
When legendary director Robert Aldrich (1918-1983) lay on his deathbed, one of the friends gathered ‘round him asked, “Can we get you anything, Bob?”
The dying man, who still had his wits and his wit about him replied, “A good script.”
Well, long before he died, Bob Aldrich, who specialized in intelligent violence, and was thus the cinematic godfather of John Milius and Walter Hill, but with a better batting average, could have used a good script for a movie he made starring Lee Marvin (1924-1987) and Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012), called Emperor of the North Pole (later renamed, Emperor of the North), released in 1973.
A great producer-director (Unforgiven, 1992) who founded the catatonic school of acting, likes to say, “The story is king.” And he’s right. But what do you do when you’ve signed on to make a picture, but the script ain’t cuttin’ it?
Nick Nolte observed, “You convince yourself you can fix the screenplay, because there’s a lot of money involved. But you can never make it work. If the script has a hole in it, it will always have that hole.”
In 1975, Kate Hepburn (1907-2002) came out of retirement for the chance to work with John Wayne (1907-1979), and Wayne was excited to work with her, even though they were at opposite ends of the spectrum politically. The producer was independent giant Hal Wallis (1899-1986), so what could go wrong? Everything. Wallis buried the two screen legends with a dead weight of a script pseudonymously penned by Wallis’ beautiful actress wife, Martha Hyer (“Martin Julien,” 1924-2014), and gave them an inexperienced, incompetent director, Stuart Millar. (The movie proved to be Wallis’ and Millar’s last, and the only script from Hyer.)
So, what did the old warhorses do? They tossed the script, ignored the director, and ad-libbed their way through the movie. Rooster Cogburn … and the Lady (1975), which was supposed to be a cross between The African Queen (1951) and True Grit (1969), became the first hit for Wayne since True Grit, and his last hit. (It was later, inexplicably, renamed Rooster Cogburn.)
The script to Emperor was written by one Christopher Knopf (1927-2019), based on a short story by tough-guy novelist/journalist, Jack London (1876-1916), that was transplanted to Great Depression I. Some reviewers at amazon.com and imdb.com explain the background to different aspects of the movie, like its title, but the movie itself has to explain those matters. The viewer shouldn’t need a guide book.
Christopher Knopf chose his family well; his paternal uncle, Alfred A. Knopf, founded the famous publishing house, which still carries his name.
Knopf had a long, successful career, writing at least 65 TV scripts, often for respected dramas like Dr. Kildare, and tv series broadcasting live theatrical dramas, and the occasional B-movie I’d never heard of, and some racial message crap, but he did not have a good, two-hour movie script in him.
Even in the best of times, there were few actors who could transcend a bad script.
Well, in Emperor, I don’t know how much Marvin and Borgnine stuck to the script, but while there’s a lot wrong with this movie, there’s nothing wrong with their performances.
The movie is set in 1933, at the height of Great Depression I, in the Pacific Northwest, all of it on or near railroad tracks, and is about two men: “A No. 1” (Marvin) and “Shack” (Borgnine).
(Great Depression II began circa 2008, and has yet to end.)
You never hear A No. 1’s real name. He’s called that, because he’s the king of the hobos who ride the rails, and everyone in his little world knows exactly to whom his moniker refers.
Shack is a man who also rides the rails, but he gets paid to do so, and everyone in his little world knows exactly who he is, too. Shack’s job title is unspecified. He’s not the engineer, or the guy who shovels coal into the furnace, to keep the train going. He is unofficially in charge of the #19 train, because he is a sadistic killer who has terrified everyone else—all the rail workers, including his own engineer, and almost all of the hobos, into submission. All but “A No. 1,” that is. (The imdb.com synopsis refers to Shack as the #19’s “conductor.”)
Shack’s rule is that “nobody rides for free” on his train. He tries to murder anyone he catches bumming a ride, and so far he has always succeeded. A No. 1’s rule is that he will ride on any and every train, without ever paying. And that means he’s set his sights on riding Shack’s #19 train to Portland.
A No. 1 goads Shack, by having much younger men climb the sides of water towers, and write in chalk that he is riding Shack’s next train to Portland.
You know this is heading toward a climactic fight to the death.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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