The Conquest of the Pole (1912) on Netflix
NR191233mAdventureHorrorSci-Fi
The engineer Professor Mabouloff presents his Aero-Bus at an Aero Club congress, a machine built to carry an international team to the North Pole. A suffragette leader plans her own expedition.
- Watch on NetflixThis title is not on Netflix right now. Please check back later for updates.
- Watch on NordVPN
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.8/101,406 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Clip
Plot summary
At a congress of the International Aero Club, explorers from many nations disagree about the best way to reach the North Pole. The club's president, the engineer Mabouloff, wins them over with his plan for the Aero-Bus, an aircraft with a passenger car and a figurehead shaped like a giant bird's head. Militant suffragettes interrupt the meeting and declare that they will make the journey themselves. Chased off, they leave the congress to choose the crew: Run-Ever, Bluff-"Allo"-Bill, Choukroutman, Cerveza, Tching-Tchun and Ka-Ko-Ku. Mabouloff then shows his colleagues the model of his machine and the electricity-powered factory where the Aero-Bus is under construction, while the suffragette leader builds a flying machine of her own, fitted with propellers and toy balloons.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Conquest of the Pole (1912)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Giant of the Snows was a marionette so large it took twelve men to operate; its head alone stood two meters high, and two puppeteers hid inside the head to work its eyes, ears, mouth and pipe.
- For the Arctic landing scene, Méliès had the camera's viewpoint rotate ninety degrees between shots so the plane's motion continued seamlessly. It was the first time he fluently used the mobile point of view, a technique pioneered by the "Brighton School" of filmmakers in England.
- The film took inspiration from the polar race of the day: Robert E. Peary's team reached the North Pole on 6 April 1909 and Roald Amundsen the South Pole on 14 December 1911, four months before Méliès began filming, while the rival claims of Frederick Cook were another thematic source.
- The film's leader of the suffragettes was conceived as a caricature of the well-known British suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst, and the women's suffrage movement remained a contemporary issue in France until the Second World War.
- The scene of a suffragette trying to join the aviation race was topical in France, where Thérèse Peltier had recently made headlines as the first woman aviator to fly solo and Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman in the world to receive an airplane pilot's licence, in 1910.
- The Giant of the Snows is thought to have influenced the first foe of Gamera, a monster that the Japanese studio Daiei Film later redeveloped as the character Daimajin.
- Méliès's deal with Pathé put his Star Film studio even further into debt than before, and the six works he made under Pathé's supervision in 1911 and 1912 turned out to be his last films.
