Leon Ray Livingston (uncredited) Jack London (uncredited)
Produced by
Kenneth Hyman Stan Hough
Starring
Lee Marvin Ernest Borgnine Keith Carradine Charles Tyner Malcolm Atterbury Harry Caesar
Cinematography
Joseph F. Biroc
Edited by
Michael Luciano
Music by
Frank De Vol
Production company
Inter-Hemisphere
Distributed by
20th Century Fox
Release date
May 24, 1973
Running time
118 minutes
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$3,705,000[1]
Box office
$2 million (US/ Canada rentals)[2][3] 251,021 admissions (France)[4]
Emperor of the North Pole is a 1973 American action adventure film directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Keith Carradine, and Charles Tyner. It was later re-released on home media (and is more widely known) under the shorter title Emperor of the North, ostensibly chosen by studio executives to avoid being mistaken for a heartwarming holiday story. This original title is a homage to the historic joke among Great Depression-era hobos that the world's best hobo was "Emperor of the North Pole", a way of poking fun at their own desperate situation, implying that somebody ruling over the North Pole would reign over nothing but a vast, barren, cold, empty, and stark wasteland.
The film depicts the story of two hobos' struggle (esp. vs. "The Establishment") during the Great Depression in 1930s Oregon. Its screenplay is quite significantly inspired by three separate yet inter-related self-published seminal writings from earlier decades: Jack London's 1907 travel memoir, The Road; and two lesser-known books, both by legendary hobo "A-No.-1", pen-name of Leon Ray Livingston: The Trail of the Tramp (1913) and From Coast to Coast with Jack London, his 1917 travelogue.
Carradine's character, Cigaret, uses the moniker that Jack London used during his hobo escapades, and like London, is portrayed as a young traveling companion to the older Livingston's A-No.-1 (played by Marvin), but that is where (some assert) the similarity between Carradine's character and Jack London ends, as Cigaret is portrayed in the film as immature, loud-mouthed, and not bright, opposite A-No.-1's gracious and graceful seasoned veteran.
^Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-8108-4244-1. p257
^"Big Rental Films of 1973", Variety, January 9, 1974 p 19
^Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, Scarecrow Press, 1989 p232
^French box office results for Robert Aldrich films at Box Office Story
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