Flight of the Eagle

Max von Sydow, who died last Sunday at the age of 90, was more than just one of the great screen actors who, like too many others I could mention, lavished his talents on mediocre star vehicles. Though he finally succumbed to the lure of Hollywood in 1965, he was lucky enough to work multiple times with two great filmmakers in his native Sweden - eleven films with Ingmar Bergman and seven with Jan Troell. Although it was with Bergman that he received the most attention, in iconic roles like the knight Blok in The Seventh Seal, who outwits Death in a game of chess, and Töre in The Virgin Spring, who savagely avenges the rape and murder of his daughter, it was for Troell that von Sydow gave his most convincing (and comprehensive) performances. He is at the center of the six-and-a-half hour Emigrants saga, playing Karl Oskar, the patriarch of a Swedish family that emigrates to Minnesota in the mid-19th century. He was totally convincing playing Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun. But it was in the relatively overlooked Flight of the Eagle (Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd, 1982) that von Sydow gave what one critic called "a magnificent, stricken-oak performance,"(1) and that I wish to use as his memorial.

Troell derived the story of the film from Per Olof Sundman's 1967 documentary novel of Salomon August Andrée, an engineer and a staunch technocrat with an interest in ballooning, who came up with the bold idea of flying a hydrogen balloon across the North Pole. In 1896, nearing the very end of the Age of Discovery, Andrée managed to persuade the Swedish King, Oscar II, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Alfred Nobel that the expedition was feasible. It was accepted as a bold plan that would bring prestige to the nation and funding was provided.(2) Andrée recruited two men, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, and together they trained and outfitted themselves for the journey. The film devotes all the time it needs to these preliminary stages, with its private and public details, to establish not just their historical context but to give convincing life to the three men, to salvage them from history. Troell is abetted in these efforts by his actors, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Fraenkel and Göran Stangertz as Strindberg. Max von Sydow gives us Andrée, a man of some accomplishment who is quite overwhelmed by the efforts of those he has inspired in the realization of his dream. He is neither a fool nor a dreamer, but a practical man of science who, the film makes clear, gets in over his head when he is given the opportunity, in the summer of 1897, to put his plans into action.

The balloon, christened the "Eagle," doesn't leave the ground in Spitzbergen until fifty-five minutes into the film.  Just after it is airborne, the balloon is caught in a downdraft and nearly sinks in the ocean. The crew throw enough ballast overboard to raise the balloon, but the accident also severs two of the three long guide-ropes which were going to be used to navigate the balloon. The men notice this, as do members of the ground crew, but the balloon continues on its way. And just sixty-five hours later - thirteen minutes in the film - it is on the ice, never to rise again. What ultimately brought the balloon down was ice buildup on the rigging and gondola, making it too heavy to gain the altitude it needed. From the time when the balloon drifted out of sight in Spitzbergen, the script had to rely on notes taken by Andrée to re-create events, simply because the fate of the expedition remained unknown until 1930. Troell opens the film with photographs taken of the remains that were discovered, including the bones of Andrée himself.

The last hour of the film, when the balloon is brought down and the men have packed sledges to make the trek across pack ice to the nearest island, is one of the most grueling stretches of film ever recorded.(3) Even so, I wondered at Troell’s use of flashbacks, as all three men find in their memories something to give them comfort or strength for the days ahead. I think the last hour would’ve been more harrowing if it had been unrelieved by the men’s glowing (and so splendidly colorful) flashbacks. One moment, however, is unforgettable: Strindberg opens a locket containing a picture of his fiancée and a lock of her hair, he removes the hair and touches it to his swollen and chapped lips.

Once they arrive on Kvitoya, a small island east of Svalbard, the film enters its final phase. Strindberg, whose photographs appear throughout the film (his photographic plates were discovered among the team’s remains) is the first to go. His body was found in a makeshift grave on the island, but there is speculation about the circumstances of his death. Some believe he may have committed suicide, others that he was killed by a polar bear. Troell simply shows him collapsing suddenly on the ice. When only Andrée and Fraenkel are left, Troell shows them, near the end, having a bitter argument, but they embrace pitifully when they realize that all they have left is each other. It is a heartbreaking moment.

It was a time when no one was around to ask the simple question, "What could possibly go wrong?" Flight of the Eagle is more than just a careful record of a doomed expedition. Yes, it was Andrée’s folly. But Troell gives the account a tragic dimension. In the film’s last moments, in which Fraenkel is killed by a polar bear and Andrée begs him not to leave him on the blasted island entirely alone, Max von Sydow emerges from the tent and peers around him at the eventless horizon, one that seems to merge the sky and the earth, and the look in his eyes is devastating. It is a moment that calls to mind a speech by Hamlet:

... this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. (4)

(1) Vernon Young.
(2) It was the same spirit of adventure that Terry Jones and Michael Palin so brilliantly mocked in their Ripping Yarns episode, "Across the Andes by Frog."
(3) When Flight of the Eagle was in limited release in the US, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, unwitting defenders of middlebrow taste, singled it out for derision on their popular TV show, Sneak Previews. When they showed the clip from the film of the balloon lying, deflated, on the ice and the three men saluting it, Siskel and Ebert both laughed, proving that a jackass can look into a mirror, but a philosopher can't look back.
(4) Act 2 Scene 2.