Emperor of the North Pole

Emperor of the North Pole is a 1973 American DeLuxe Color film directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Keith Carradine. 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 confused as a heartwarming holiday story. This original title is an 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, since 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 US' 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 better-known 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, and his 1917 travelogue, From Coast to Coast with Jack London. 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.