Wonderful character development!

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

I looked up this little-known gem because the director Mikhail Kalatozov had also directed Letter Never Sent. Though the story is a bit hard to follow, since it is told as a recollection and an imaginary reunion of the principals involved. The cinematography is outstanding, capturing the desolateness and starkness of the arctic, along with a haunting soundtrack. The cast is very solid, the story - true life outweighs fiction. I have always found films dealing with survival in the elements to be fascinating. This film keep the viewer engrossed, without resorting to cheap dramatics, or sentimentality. Just solid filmmaking.

A reader saw that I am on a frigid historical adventure movie kick and recommended this. I'm glad.For background, 100 to 80 years ago the world was captivated by polar explorers. All sorts of complex and powerful drama unfolded, reflecting both the power of natural forces and the destiny of nations. What got me into this global story was the confabulation of the Scott and Shackleton expeditions to the south pole. The world saw this as the end of empire for the Brits, and so it was. An aristocratic bearing and feeling of manifest destiny are thin tools to take into Antarctica. And the process of encounter and defeat had filmmakers along!But once you get captured by the story, all sorts of other stories emerge. What's a great adventure is to track those through the films made to recount the original events, either as dramatizations or new fiction. One slant of course is films made by the Brits about themselves. Truly intriguing, sort of a "50 Up." Another are films made that focus on the technology. "Dirigible," sort of blew me away, even though I hardly realized that the events depicted here (the Nobile disaster) were only two years earlier. Ignorance of history thwarts the senses.Now this. Here's the most interesting of them all so far as cinema is concerned. First let me say that the version I saw was the 2 hour one released to the world. Somewhere in post-Soviet vaults are two other "director's" cuts (whatever that means in a Soviet film industry), at a half hour the other an hour longer.Mixed in here in a single stew are all sorts of threads and traditions.Its by a great Soviet filmmaker. I've send one of his masterpieces and have yet to see the second. This, well this is a mess, obviously something that ran out of control. And that's one reason to love it: its just the sort of disaster it depicts: overblown, a second rate country trying to score internationally with a bold stroke and then unable to back out. There are wonderful scenes of a Russian ham operator intercepting the SOS and being left ashore on a rising drawbridge as the icebreaker sails without him. This sequence reminds you why Tarkovsky and Eisenstein matter. Its brilliant. Simply brilliant.Its an international project. Though the main story here is of inept Italians, and the outcome was a major kick of that nation down stairs to the basement of relevance where it squats today, it was financed and coproduced by Italians! Italians and Soviets! What a mix. As a result, you can see the tussle in the story and staging, part "Dersu Uzala," part spaghetti western. Its set as a trial of the Italian general by ghosts from the story, and this (obviously inspired by later Bunuel). You have a Scot playing a Norweigian, a Brit an Italian, a Frenchwoman some nationality unknown , a Russian a Swede...The arctic scenery is not as amazingly photographed as I would have expected, and footage from all sorts irrelevant spots are mixed helter skelter. It negates the coherence of the frigid threat.Elsewhere, it attempts to find some complexity in the decisions and "accountability" of failed leaders, something the Italians share with Soviets of the era. This is a disaster, even with Sean Connery at his most renown, playing the one character that really mattered in the drama. That was the Amundsen, the man who was the first to the South Pole, a story of intelligence, planning and resolve over class and national arrogance. He literally changed the face of the earth. He was killed while looking for these inept adventurers.We also have Claudia Cardinale shoehorned in. She's been in some massively great film experience. There are scenes with her in a romantic revelry in the snow that are among the most embarrassing I have ever seen. I mean this. She is lovely and redheaded here, but she should have been excised, though there is an intended great scene where she talks Connery into his doomed search for her already perished lover. Her scenes look like they were shot by an unknown Italian second unit guy.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

The Red Tent chronicles the series of polar disasters beginning with the crash of the dirigible piloted by Italian General Umberto Nobile trying to make a historic air crossing of the North Pole. Nobile is played by Peter Finch in this epic film that unfortunately due to a bad publicity campaign and an indifference to the subject by western audiences made this historic Russian-Italian jointly produced film a financial disaster.That's a pity because photographically it's one of the finest things ever put on celluloid stock. There are some absolutely breathtaking shots of the frozen tundra and the performances of the actors battling the elements are first rate. Maybe a straight narrative might have been better instead of having the aged Nobile confronting some angry spirits of the past. Nobile was still alive when this film came out, he would die in 1978 still a figure of controversy. The dream with the angry spirits is a device frankly ripped off from George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan.Maybe the film could be best compared to William Wellman's Island in the Sky that starred John Wayne. The fictional characters there are mostly rescued and held together by Duke's leadership. Of course some thirty years advance in aviation and no political interference helped Wayne's men. And Island in the Sky is a work of fiction.Maybe it wouldn't be so if men of science could simply be men of science without answering to competing ideologies. Nobile and his men got caught up in the politics of the time. Politics claimed a lot of their lives and the lives of Roald Amundsen and party who vanished in a rescue attempt. Nobile also made some bad choices and had some bad choices forced on him by Mussolini's fascist government. He was also a man out of his element, he was great aviation pioneer, but not a polar explorer. He paid with his reputation, some of his party paid with their lives.Sean Connery has a small role as Roald Amundsen and I wish we had more of him here. Finch has a very effective scene with Claudia Cardinale the widow of one of his men where she takes him to task. Hardy Kruger does a fine job as the aviator presenting Finch with a very disagreeable choice.I'd recommend seeing it, but only on the big screen. Or definitely in a letter box version. The formatted VHS I have definitely hampers the spectacle.

I reckon I must have seen this as a young boy, probably around the age of 11, in the late 70'es. I saw it on TV at that time. The images of this movie to this day are very vivid in my memory, the ice, and the desperation it depicts. Although I don't recall much of the plot, and perhaps didn't even grasp it completely at the time, a few scenes are simply as etched in my brain: The scene where they struggle to repair the radio with graphite from a pencil. And of course Nobile's talks with the ghosts. I also seem to recall that Amundsen as portrayed by Connery came across as a rather self-righteous and arrogant person.A movie that can make such a lasting impression must possess some significant qualities.