When Hollywood makes films that prominently feature railways, the results can be quite mixed. Consider disaster-genre films, such as “Unstoppable” (2010) or “Runaway Train” (1985), that depict fictional dangers (such as locomotives that seem to run on jet fuel), when the actual disasters of railroading are likely to stem from a shifted load, track defect, or unset handbrake. Other films, ranging from the many adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express to the regrettable Steven Seagal vehicle “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory” (1995), mostly use trains as a way to confine a set of characters together, but otherwise offer little window into the real world of railroading.
One film that stands out is “Emperor of the North” (Robert Aldrich, 1973). Currently unavailable on streaming media, it can be found on DVD. Set during the Great Depression on an unnamed western railway, “Emperor” focuses directly on railway employees and hobo culture. The cast is all-star — Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, and Keith Carradine. The plot, meanwhile, is simple — the conductor, Shack (Borgnine), is strict about keeping free-riding hobos off his train, to the point of murder. Two hobos, A No. 1 (Marvin) and Cigaret (Carradine), spend the movie trying to outwit Shack and ride his train from one end of the railway to the other. The movie contains 1930s social commentary, with a smattering of cartoonish but brutal violence along the way.
Production took place primarily on Oregon, Pacific & Eastern, a short line that had a roster of steam locomotives and an active tourist business. It was also a railroad with a Hollywood pedigree, being the line used in Buster Keaton’s 1926 slapstick comedy “The General.” The railroad’s 19, a 1915, Baldwin-built 2-8-2, gets as much screen time as any of the human stars, with numerous loving close-ups and more than a few cinematic wide views in the idyllic, forested, mountainous landscape. (Today, the 19 is in the care of the Age of Steam Roundhouse Museum in Sugarcreek, Ohio.)
Is “Emperor” an accurate film about railroading or hobo culture? Absolutely not. Anachronisms abound, most notably the appearance of brand-new Evergreen plug-door boxcars in the background of a film meant to be set in 1933. The hand signals given by the fictional crew, meanwhile, are casual at best and wildly vague at worst. In one scene, the conductor pulls the whistle cord and, later, grabs the throttle away from the engineer, taboo actions in the real world that would likely have been met with anger if not physical altercation. Borgnine’s Shack does manage, at times, to look at home swinging up onto the side of a boxcar or walking purposefully down the rooftop running boards of a moving train, but this is no picture of railroading as craft.
Despite this, the film is something of a cult classic for those involved in American heritage steam operations, a group to which I once belonged. It was common to hear quotes from the film, usually for comic effect. How many times did I hear someone crack, “He’s gonna highball in the yard,” or the paraphrase of “No ’bos ride my train!” or Marvin’s crack, “I was tellin’ you, there was a day a dump had quality.”
There’s something of the texture of the film that rings true, even past the distorted accuracy and the comic opera violence — think red paint and ketchup for blood. To those of us who were close to the breathing machines that were preserved steam, “Emperor” got something fundamental right even as the details were wrong — and for that, it remains a touchstone.
—Alexander Benjamin Craghead is a transportation historian, photographer, artist, and author.