The Swedish 19th century engineer S. A. Andrée sets out to become the first man on the north pole. His idea is to launch a polar expedition using a hydrogen balloon, together with two friends. The balloon, “The Eagle”, takes off from Svalbard in 1897, but the three men are not heard of again.
Director: Jan Troell. AKA The Flight of the Eagle
Writers: Klaus Rifbjerg, Ian Rakoff, Jan Troell & Georg Oddner (screenplay), Per Olof Sundman (freely adapted from the novel by).
Stars: Max von Sydow, Göran Stangertz, Sverre Anker, Clément Harari, Eva von Hanno, Lotta Larsson, Jan-Olof Strandberg, Henric Holmberg, Ulla Sjöblom, Mimi Pollak, Cornelis Vreeswijk, Ingvar Kjellson, Bruno Sörwing.
1983 Academy Awards – Nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
1982 Venice Film Festival – Nominated for the Golden Lion,
a great film. A must for all. Thanks Jon
Much grateful, Jon!
The quality of this upload is just wonderful. Thank you so much for this. It’s so clear!
Thank you very much for this
Wow. Haven’t seen this since its American release sometime in the early ‘8os. The transfer stock was not nearly so good. This shows Troell’s cinematic color schema at its very best. As with THE EMIGRANTS and THE NEW LAND on their maiden US voyages substantial footage was also excised. This carries a whole extra 30 minutes and what a difference it truly makes. So good to have THE EMIGRANT films and this back in original shape. The pacing is completely different in all three now. the color is truly breathtaking. And Max . . . well, more Max is ALWAYS good! Thanks!
Thanx Gregory, for hinting me to this Jan Troell masterpiece! Just watched it in one take and am mesmerized. 10/10. Should have won the 1983 Oscars. I gotta check, which movie won.
If anything, this is a better film than The Emigrants at least to me.
Thanks very much, Jon!
I’d like to re-post this not for argument but for consideration:
When the THE EMIGRANTS and THE NEW LAND were released in the US I was still in high school. It’s the fashion these days to speak of Troell’s EMIGRANT saga as less then: too derivative of John Ford to be unique and on and on and on. Liv Ullmann, who considers it to be the crowning glory of all her film work, doesn’t feel that way and neither did her friend Ingmar Bergman who absolutely loved it. After years of treacly, sanitized TV and Hollywood accounts of the immigrant experience produced by us for ourselves, Troell brought out his epic two-parter which attempted to come much closer to the truth. While I’m sure it must “read” differently to those who reside outside the USA, I’ll never forget the power of witnessing those two films of his, even in the truncated form in which each was released at the time. For the first time, as an American, his films taught me WHY people wanted so desperately to come here and what they were willing to sacrifice in order to put that in place. Now that they have been restored to their original length I find them even more effectively moving ‘in toto’. It’s not the whole story for certain, but it tells its story well. Given the incorrigible events which we have witnessed here in the US in the last several years, I’d recommend all Americans during the remains of the pandemic to watch those films to remember an important element of “Why we were what we were” and — more painfully — to ponder on how much of that might have been radically lost. AMEN.
Of the many great films I’ve seen on RF, this and Verhoeven’s Turks Fruit are thus far my favorites.