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| Courtesy of Mosfilm and Paramount Pictures |
Based on the true story of the ill-fated Italian airship Italia
commandeered by Umberto Nobile (one of the ship’s only survivors) which
crash landed in the arctic region in 1928 followed by an extensive and hazardous
rescue mission that claimed as many lives as it tried saving, the film is a
mammoth joint Italian-Soviet coproduction prominently featuring English
speaking actors Peter Finch and Sean Connery in the leading roles amid a bilingual
cast of Italian-Russian speaking actors.
Loosely adapted by novelist Yuri Nagibin co-authored by Kalatozov with
uncredited rewrites from Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago screenwriter
Robert Bolt, this disaster-survival epic proved to be the director’s final film
as he passed away two years later. And
what a film it is!
Adopting a fictitious, surrealist angle with Nobile imagining
his apartment as a courtroom with Rashomon-like testimonies from the
living and dead such as Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (Sean Connery) who
died searching for survivors, the film cuts back and forth freely between the
past and present with the ghosts of those who died by Nobile’s side as well as
those died trying to save him holding him on trial. A psychological drama of endurance echoing
Kalatozov’s own wartime drama The Cranes Are Flying as well as a raw and
nail-biting visceral survival thriller sure to make the likes of Clouzot blush,
The Red Tent is debatably the director’s most harrowing picture with
many scenes of survivors on icebergs surrounded by nothing but water.
Aided by stunning location photography by Anna Karenina as
well as uncredited Stalker cinematographer Leonid Kalashnikov who makes
grand use of wide-angled lenses and released in two separate versions with the
Russian cut featuring a score by Aleksandr Zatsepin running 158 minutes while
the Italian-English versions clocked in at about 121 minutes with an Ennio
Morricone score and some additional shots not used in the Russian version, The
Red Tent tries to completely put you in General Umberto Nobile (Peter
Finch) shoes.
Following him living in
Rome years after the deadly expedition that claimed the lives of many as well
as tarnished the reputations of its key survivors with much of what’s seen onscreen
lived in his mad, guilt-ridden head, The Red Tent is at once an action-adventure
oriented historical drama as well as somber paean to the lives lost in what
proved to be a suicidal rescue mission. Almost
as many people if not more died simply trying to retrieve survivors, all of it
weighing heavily on Nobile’s mind.
Curiously Sean Connery’s role as Amundsen, while good, took
billing over Peter Finch’s role who is ostensibly the film’s main character and
tragic figure. Moreover, Connery was
only on the shoot for a few weeks while Finch endured the cold Spitzbergen
Archipelago, the Baltic Sea and later studio work between Moscow and Rome for
about nine months altogether. There’s a
romantic subplot worked into the proceedings by one of the film’s producers
prominently featuring his wife (at the time) Claudia Cardinale and Barry
Lyndon actor Hardy Kruger that works against the otherwise immersive
totality of the movie but when the film spends its time with the survivors in
the freezing cold, it chills to the bone literally and figuratively.
One of the very first co-productions between Russia and a
western country as well as the last film of arguably Russia’s greatest film
director, the story of The Red Tent and its bold and ultimately doomed
rescue mission is as terrifying as it is somber. A cold weather survival drama gargantuan in
size and scope with much of the director’s extraordinary filmmaking magic tricks
on full display including but not limited to wild handheld camerawork and crane
shots that seem to float in the air, the film is also for its day a solid entry
in the then-heating up disaster film subgenre.
For Connery the film is something of a vacation for the actor but Peter
Finch takes the film on from top to bottom giving it his all and making the
troubled Nobile into a somewhat sympathetic figure unfortunately also
responsible for the deaths of many.
In Kalatazov’s oeuvre, The Red Tent is a sobering
farewell which shows the director going back to making a wintery action-drama ala
Letter Never Sent with just enough of his wild, frenetic yet precisely controlled
camerawork to remind you of I Am Cuba.
Admittedly, as was the case with the Italian and English language
versions, hearing Connery and Finch dubbed over in Russian is somewhat unusual though
as with all three release versions the dialogue is somewhat secondary to the
recurring vistas of tiny humans clinging together for life in the middle of an
endless white snowy terrain.
Over the course of the movie, you find yourself sharing in
the communal experience of what it must’ve been like to be trapped in the
middle of the arctic with a faint glimmer of hope for survival. The setup of much of the self-imposed “trial”
is indeed a strange approach to this subject but at the end of the day, The
Red Tent is a solid closing chapter to the great director’s checkered if
not largely overlooked career and just a great historical drama-thriller in
general with keen attention to detail and a refreshing approach to the disaster
film.
--Andrew Kotwicki
