Ernest Borgnine is the meanest sonofabitch on the railroad and Lee Marvin is the hobo who gives him a hard time riding the rails. The period is the Depression when hobos rode the rails with impunity and it was up to hard-as-nails guys like Ernest to stop them. Robert Aldrich's "Emperor of the North" is one of his male-orientated pictures, displaying a good deal of his signature brutality and while it's a minor work in the Aldrich canon it has much to recommend it; here it's the duel to the death between Marvin and Borgnine who makes for a truly nasty villain and is just one of the reasons why this is such a ridiculously entertaining picture. Nice work too from a young Keith Carradine as a fellow hobo with aspirations to take Marvin's crown as 'Emperor of the North'.
Review of Emperor of the North
