Flight of the Eagle

This article is about the film. For the novel, see Flight of the Eagle (novel).

Flight of the Eagle
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Jan Troell
Produced by	Jörn Donner Göran Setterberg
Written by	Screenplay: Jan Troell Georg Oddner Ian Rakoff Klaus Rifbjerg Novel: Per Olof Sundman
Starring	Max von Sydow Sverre Anker Ousdal Göran Stangertz.
Music by	Carl-Axel Dominique Hans-Erik Philip
Cinematography	Jan Troell
Edited by	Jan Troell
Release dates	26 August 1982 (1982-08-26) (Sweden)
Running time	140 minutes
Country	Sweden West Germany Norway
Language	Swedish French
Budget	20 million SEK

Flight of the Eagle (Swedish: Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd) is a 1982 Swedish biographical drama film directed by Jan Troell, based on Per Olof Sundman's novelization of the true story of S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897, an ill-fated effort to reach the North Pole in which all three expedition members perished. The film stars Max von Sydow as S.A. Andrée, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Knut Frænkel and Göran Stangertz as Nils Strindberg. Dutch-Swedish songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk plays the role of the journalist Lundström.

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 55th Academy Awards. Many sequences from the film were used in the 1997 documentary A Frozen Dream (En frusen dröm), also directed by Troell.

Cast

• Max von Sydow as Salomon August Andrée
• Göran Stangertz as Nils Strindberg
• Sverre Anker Ousdal as Knut Frænkel
• Clément Harari as Henri Lachambre
• Eva von Hanno as Gurli Linder
• Lotta Larsson as Anna Charlier
• Jan-Olof Strandberg as Nils Ekholm
• Henric Holmberg as Vilhelm Swedenborg
• Ulla Sjöblom as Andrée's Sister
• Mimi Pollak as Mina Andrée
• Cornelis Vreeswijk as Lundström
• Ingvar Kjellson as Alfred Nobel
• Bruno Sörwing as Oscar II of Sweden
• Åke Wihlney as The Captain
• Berto Marklund as The Ship's Doctor
• Knut Husebø as Fridtjof Nansen
• Allan Schulman as Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld
• Staffan Liljander as The Inventor
• Peter Schildt as Andrée's clerk
• Siv Ericks as Mrs. Assarsson

Production

The early drafts for a script were written in 1977, and the same year a team consisting of Jan Troell, the producer Bengt Forslund, the original writer of the novel Per Olof Sundman and a few other people went to Spitsbergen for location scouting. Troell was at the time in the post-production process of his film Bang!, and when Bang! was selected for the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, the plan was to use the festival to attract investors. However, Bang! was poorly received and the interest faded even from the Swedish Film Institute. The project was put on hold and Troell went to the United States to direct Hurricane, an assignment he was offered after the previous director Roman Polanski had suddenly left the country to avoid sentencing for unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old in Los Angeles.

When Troell returned to Sweden, and the film institute had gotten Jörn Donner as its new managing director, the project was revived. In May 1979 the new writing process started, this time led by Georg Oddner and Klaus Rifbjerg, with Donner himself as producer. The financing was difficult, not least because it coincided with the making of Fanny and Alexander, at the time the most expensive Swedish film ever made.

Release

The film premiered on 26 August 1982 in Gränna, the hometown of Andrée. It was entered into the 1982 Venice Film Festival, where Max von Sydow won the Pasinetti Award for Best Actor. A VHS version was released in Sweden in November 2000, but no DVD or Blu-ray version exists, nor is there any version with English subtitles. However, a version with Swedish dialogue and English subtitles was broadcast on New Zealand television in the 1990s.

Critical reception

The Swedish critics were generally very positive about the film. It was praised for its attention to details and how complete it felt in a review in Göteborgs-Posten by Monika Tunbäck-Hanson: "It is the overall approach and the fixed grip that contemporary Swedish films are so often lacking. Jan Troell lacks neither." Hans Erik Hjertén at Dagens Nyheter made a comparison to Troell's previous films: "The smallness of the humans, ripped from the larger community, is cleverly demonstrated by Troell by letting Strindberg at a distance cover his comrades with a single finger! In such details, the storyteller Troell has always had his strength and has it here too, but he is more restrained than before, it appears to me. Here is not the same profusion of lyrical whims as in previous films."

Internationally the film was also well received. Vincent Canby expressed in a review for The New York Times how he would like to know more about which parts of the story that were derived directly from Andrée's journal and which were speculation. He further wrote that the film "leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Yet the adventure is both panoramic and unusually intimate. Toward the end of the expedition, the personal drama of the three men, as they are overtaken by fate, is detailed with an intensity that is as moving as the earlier sequences are spectacular."

See also

• List of submissions to the 55th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of Swedish submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

External links

• Flight of the Eagle at IMDb
• Flight of the Eagle at the Swedish Film Institute Database