EMPEROR OF THE NORTH POLE (1973)

Just pretend it has the right title

To get the taste of yesterday's Hobo movie out of your mouth, I implore you, watch this Hobo adventure film.  I first saw this three years ago thanks to the employee recommendations section at Reel Video (RIP) and I've wanted to watch it again ever since.  Well thank you Netflix!  Lee Marvin plays A#1, a legendary Hobo during the Hobo heyday of the 1930's, a Hobo's Hobo if you will.  Faithful to the Hobo lifestyle, A#1 wants to ride the rails, feeling the freedom of no fixed address and no fiduciary responsibilities.  The only obstacle to his lifestyle is Ernest Borgnine, and if you laughed when you read that, then Borgnine took advantage of your distraction and killed you. 

Ernest Borgnine is a serious mean motherfucker in this movie.  Train conductors were responsible for policing their own trains for stowaways, and the woods of the Pacific Northwest might as well be the high seas as far as law and order is concerned, so sadistic bullies like Borgnine's character, the strangely named The Shack, are able to dispatch Hobos with extreme prejudice.  The opening of the movie finds an unnamed Hobo peacefully eating a sandwich between stock cars in blissful ignorance, just like that drunk girl swimming at the beginning of Jaws, before Borgnine sneaks up behind and clocks him with a hammer, knocking him under the train and letting the train turn him into two evenly sized Hobo pieces.

Lee Marvin is badass enough that we're not worried about his well being in the conflict, we're worried whether or not the world can survive a battle of such titans.  Lee Marvin is so tough, that he doesn't need to start the movie with some sort of slavish act of macho posturing.  A#1 starts the movie fighting off children and Keith Carradine from stealing his chicken, by beating them with the chicken, and then hopping a train to escape.  He even later sets fire to a train car to escape from the rail cops.  He doesn't need to impress you!  He'll run from fights until he's ready to not run from fights.

This movie has an inappropriate soft rock ballad near the beginning, but the recurring musical motif from this song works wells.  Keith Carradine is kinda annoying, but I think that's mostly the point, and he gets quite possibly the greatest kiss off in cinema history from Lee Marvin: "Kid you got no class!"  The dialogue is rich and textured (like mashed potatoes) thanks to extensive use of period railroad lingo and Hobo slang.  Even the names of the Hobos and railwaymen are unusual; Cigaret, Shack, Hogger, Cracker, Smile, Gray Cat.  Elisha Cook Jr. plays Gray Cat, and since he was in Pat Garret & Billy The Kid and Ernest Borgnine was in The Wild Bunch I wonder if they talked about how drunk/scary/talented Sam Peckinpah was.  Probably.

The other Hobos and rail employees of the film represent an enormous collection of character actors, and the very best kind of them.  Everybody's face is ragged, weathered, pockmarked, and covered in a million and a half lines of experience, personality, and age.  It doesn't hurt that everybody in the movie is sweating constantly, wearing the same clothes for days, covered in grease and blood and coal and a hundred other gross substances.  If you weren't having so much fun you'd be distracted by the smell.

Special effects?  Well there aren't really any, and that's what makes them special.  They're really on a train!  For reals, a moving train, and they're standing around on top fighting and jumping and all sorts of dangerous stuff.  Lee Marvin and Keith Carradine are really hanging underneath trains, just a few feet above the tracks.  My god this must have been dangerous.  Carradine even dangles down a rail bridge to avoid detection.  The fight scenes have equal parts brutal realism and technicolor blood blasts, with a climactic old man fight that rivals The Boys From Brazil for the best ever climactic old man fight ever put on film.  Seriously, these guys have at each other with chains, 2x4's, and hammers.

Hobos have their own society, with unusual phrases and customs.  The title refers to being the best Hobo, or king of the Hobos, which is a dubious distinction, as your dominion is essentially a wasteland.  That strange sense of humor and the weird underlying logic makes their culture laughably confusing to an outsider; a policeman played by Simon Oakland, the chief from Bullitt, chases Lee Marvin into a Hobo camp when he steals a turkey, and ends up sucked into a psych-out standoff wherein the Hobos force him to bark like a dog and drink a tin cup full of some kind of fermented garbage juice.

This film is really about a battle of wills, between Marvin and Borgnine, the Hobo world and the straight world, or as director Robert Aldrich envisioned it, the anti-establishment vs. the establishment, with Keith Carradine representing the clueless youth.  Riding the rails becomes a matter of pride and not practicality.  Both men are willing to risk their lives, and the lives of others, just to prove their manhood.  Neither man will back down.  Shack absolutely will not tolerate any Hobos on his train and A#1 absolutely will not tolerate being told he can't ride any train he pleases.  They are locked on a collision course right from the beginning.

What's the best/most oblique way I can lavish praise on this film?  It makes me think of that scene in Ghostbusters where they're in jail and looking at the plans of the building and Bill Murray says 'they don't make 'em like they used to' and Dan Aykroyd dope-slaps him and says'"No! They never made 'em like this!'  You could say about this film, 'they don't make 'em like this anymore', but I'm not sure if they ever made them like this.  Sure there are other movies where really dangerous stuff happens on real trains, like the Buster Keaton silent classic The General, but I don't know any other movies that are Hobo adventure spectaculars.

Do yourself a favor and watch this movie right now.  You can skip the terrible opening song if you want, just make sure to watch the rest.

If you don't watch this movie, Ernie Borgnine will find you.