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!)

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!)
By Nicholas Stix

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 (1929-2006). (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.

A No. 1 is a man who seeks to lead a light-hearted, carefree life. He’s a middle-aged version of Huck Finn, whom we have seen before from Mr. Clemens and Roger Willliams.

Shack is reminiscent of the sadistic, murderous, Great Depression era railroad cops and security guards whom we saw in Steinbeck and Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941).

Shack is so vicious that even when his assistant is right, in having seen a hobo’s hat on the side of the track on a bridge, he makes the man admit to having been “wrong.” (My chief of research: “He sounds like a lot of people you worked for or with.”)

Cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc (1903-1996) was one of the few bright spots.

Emperor is also an ode to great character actors, some of whom you’ll know by face, and some also by name: Charles Tyner (1925-2017), Malcolm Atterbury (1907-1992), Elisha Cook (1903-1995; he’d by then dropped the “Jr.”; The Maltese Falcon, Shane, etc.); Simon Oakland (1915-1983; I Want to Live, The Sand Pebbles, etc.); Vic Tayback (1930-1990; the sitcom Alice, and otherwise ubiquitous during the 1970s), et al. You see these faces in the mobile hobo jungle, and among the railroad workers. However, we only see Cook for one solitary second. (Since his character has a name in the credits, “Gray Cat,” I’m guessing that almost all of Cook’s performance ended up on the cutting room floor. Then again, Carradine’s character is listed as “Cigaret,” but I don’t recall ever hearing that.)

“Coaly” (so-called, because he filled the steam engine with coal; Harry Caesar, 1928-1994) was a member of Aldrich’s unofficial stock company, as were Borgnine (The Flight of the Phoenix, 1965; The Dirty Dozen, 1967) and Marvin (Attack!, 1956; The Dirty Dozen, 1967).

Marvin and Borgnine are both fantastic, as are all but one of the supporting players, and yet the picture is mediocre.

One oddity about both of the stars is that Marvin has a slight paunch (in every other role I ever saw him play, he was lean—6'1 1/2" and 175 lbs.), and while Borgnine was typically 50-60 pounds overweight, in this movie, he is more like 150 pounds overweight (at most 5'9," whatever imdb.com says, and 300 lbs.).

Borgnine does much with his eyes, while Marvin makes sound effects with his mouth.

But imagine that? Having such talent on hand that they can transcend a bad script!

But it’s not just the script that’s bad. The theme song, composed by Frank DeVol (1912-1999), who did the score, with lyrics by Hal David (1921-2012), and sung by Marty Robbins (1925-1982), is subpar. That year, David, one of the greatest lyricists in the history of modern music, found he was burned out, and suddenly retired from his 18-year-long partnership with Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), and from songwriting in general.

And the sound stinks from start to end. The sound for the song during the opening credits is extremely low, as is the sound for the dialogue, no matter how high I turned up the volume on our TV. (I confirmed this with my chief of research, who watched it with me.)

There is, unfortunately, a third actor along for the ride. He is Keith Carradine (1949-). Carradine doesn’t give a lousy performance; it’s just a stupid role, of a character that one can only despise, and he couldn’t transcend the script. Carradine’s character is a blowhard and liar who tags along with A No. 1. He’s always seeking to steal credit for other men’s acts of derring-do. Three times, A No. 1 saves his life, but the one time he could have saved the older man’s life, he did nothing. I suppose London had crossed paths with the type, and decided to tell of him.

There are other problems with the script.

How do A No. 1 and his tag-along manage to repeatedly get off the #19, and yet always catch up to it? (One time, they catch a slightly later train, and catch up to #19, which had taken a break, but there are other times where there is no explanation, credible or otherwise.)

How does the hobo jungle manage to move along with the train, so it is always near to A No. 1’s train?

Since it was his movie, all of these problems were also Bob Aldrich’s problems.

It would be dishonest of me to say that this movie encapsulates the greatness of its two stars. Their greatness was everywhere!

Screenwriter-director-producer Richard Brooks (1912-1992) claimed that, due to Marvin’s alcoholism, his work was already deteriorating by the time they made the classic Western, The Professionals (1966), together.

Baloney! In the aforementioned picture, Marvin gave exquisite line readings, and also handled the action scenes excellently. He was also great the following year in Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen. Heck, when wasn’t he great?!

The same year that Emperor came out, Marvin starred in the American Film Theater production of The Iceman Cometh, one of O’Neill’s trilogy of masterpieces (with Moon for the Misbegotten, which I saw on the legitimate stage with O’Neill’s alter ego, Jason Robards Jr. (1922-1990), and George C. Scott’s old punching bag, Colleen Dewhurst with my mom in 1975; and Long Day’s Journey into Night, which we saw in the disastrous 1986 revival, starring Jack Lemmon (Lemmon had the edges of his role as O’Neill’s father softened), and in the 1962 film version, starring Kate Hepburn). In the extremely talky role of Hickey, in a play that runs almost four hours long, Marvin was spellbinding.

So, why wasn’t he nominated for an Oscar? The producer of the American Film Theater was a flake named Ely A. Landau (1920-1993), who had the brilliant idea of releasing each of his pictures for one weekend, before pulling them from circulation. The play was filmed with other brilliant but dying thespians in their last respective roles: Fredric March and Robert Ryan.

So, why wasn’t Marvin nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his turn as sadistic gunslinger Liberty Valance, in Ford’s (1894-1973) last masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)? Maybe because Hollywood had turned on John Ford, or maybe because of fickle, fickle Oscar!

And so, Hollywood gave Marvin a make-up Oscar for Best Actor for the silly but entertaining 1965 Western, Cat Ballou, in which a young Jane Fonda was the nominal star, and Marvin played a double role, one of which was a parody of his turn as Liberty Valance. That was Richard Burton’s Oscar, for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. (Burton would get two more nominations, but never get his make-up Oscar.)

Borgnine won his Oscar as Best Actor for Marty (1955), but that was Hank Fonda’s Oscar for Mr. Roberts. However, Borgnine should have also been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for The Wild Bunch (1969), as Bill Holden’s sidekick, “Dutch.” (The Academy finally gave Fonda his make-up Oscar for his last movie, On Golden Pond (1981), with Kate Hepburn, whom it gave her fourth Best Actress Oscar.)

Borgnine, an old sailor, was so fearless an actor that in 1956, he played second banana as Bette Davis’ taxi driver husband, in the Paddy Chayefsky story, The Catered Affair. And he held his own! At the end of his life, Borgnine, who never retired, played the senile super-hero, Mermaid Man, with Tim Conway playing his non-senile second banana, Barnacle Boy, on the TV cartoon, Sponge Bob, Square Pants.

Since Borgnine’s Emperor character is completely unsympathetic, while Marvin’s is almost unblemished, you’ll probably “like” Marvin much more. But dramatically, it’s a draw.

So, should you see Emperor? Definitely! But see it for Borgnine and Marvin, not Aldrich or Knopf.