Trailer
Plot summary
The Great Depression has left the country full of homeless men who ride the freight trains. Shack, conductor of the No. 19, will not let a hobo ride for free. A-No.-1 is the most experienced tramp in the Northwest, and the brash young Cigaret travels with him. When a rumor credits Cigaret rather than A-No.-1 with beating Shack, A-No.-1 announces that he will ride the No. 19 all the way to Portland, and the hobos agree that the first to manage it earns the title Emperor of the North Pole. Railroad workers spread the news by telephone and telegraph and lay bets on whether he can do it.
Cast
- Joe Di Redaas Dinger (as Joe di Reda)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Emperor of the North (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The original title is a nod to the joke among Great Depression hobos that the world's best hobo was 'Emperor of the North Pole', a way of poking fun at their own desperate situation, since ruling the North Pole meant reigning over a barren, empty wasteland.
- The film was shot in and around Cottage Grove, Oregon, along the active right-of-way of the Oregon, Pacific and Eastern Railway, the same location Buster Keaton had used for his 1927 railroad feature The General.
- The film was a box office failure, and Robert Aldrich later confessed he had misjudged its appeal: he thought the symbols were clear, and it never occurred to him that audiences would miss that Borgnine was the Establishment and Marvin the anti-Establishment individualist.
- When Intrada Records put out the only commercial CD of the soundtrack in 2008, 35 years after the film, its unused cues revealed that Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers had originally recorded the vocals, but was replaced at the last minute, for unknown reasons, by Marty Robbins.
- For home media the film was re-released under the shorter title Emperor of the North, ostensibly chosen by studio executives to avoid it being mistaken for a heartwarming holiday story.
- Borgnine's fee for the film was $150,000, and it was the fifth of six films in which he and Marvin appeared together.
