User Reviews

Jan Baalsrud in 1943 was a Norwegian commando involved in running guns from the Shetland Islands to the Norwegian resistance fighters. His fishing smack was intercepted by a German patrol boat and sunk. All of his colleagues were killed, but Baalsrud managed to leap overboard, losing one boot, and swim through the icy waters of the fjord to land, pursued on sea and on land by enemy soldiers. After he climbed onto the shore, his uniform froze solid and encased his body in ice.

It didn't get better for Baalsrud for months. If you can imagine any catastrophe associated with snowy mountains in brutal winter weather, he went through it -- snow blindness, avalanches, frostbite, gangrene. A manhunt was underway and Baalsrud became a symbol of the Norwegian resistance. He entered a kind of underground railway, the kind used to help slaves escape from the South before the Civil War, with lots of spots where the rails aren't connected and somebody has to schlepp him through the wilderness. .

If I may, I'll just quote a summary of Baalsrud's tribulations from the New York Times Magazine, otherwise I'd just have to paraphrase it.

"What happened over those nine weeks remains one of the wildest, most unfathomable survival stories of World War II. Baalsrud's feet froze solid. An avalanche buried him up to his neck. He wandered in a snowstorm for three days. He was entombed alive in snow for another four days and abandoned under open skies for five more. Alone for two more weeks in a cave, he used a knife to amputate several of his own frostbitten toes to stop the spread of gangrene. He spent the last several weeks tied on a stretcher, near death, as teams of Norwegian villagers dragged him up and down hills and snowy mountains. By the end, Baalsrud was less a hero than a package in need of safe delivery, out of Nazi hands. For decades, his escape made him into a Norwegian national folk hero."

It's an enthralling story of endurance. As a film it's virtues are mixed. There are stunning shots of snowy landscapes, blindingly white, with morbid black crags sticking out of them. The acting is passable, no more than that, although anyone who wants to take a peek at a generic Nordic face ought to check out Henny Moan as the wife of one of Baalsrud's helpers -- sharp-featured, determined, slope nosed, and pretty. The editing isn't so hot. There isn't enough sense of where we are or what's going on or how much time has passed. There are some images I still can't decode.

You know what? This is a heroic tale, an epic story, and it needs to be remade by a sensitive and talented director. It wouldn't be simply the story of a lone man overcoming odds, a Scandinavian Hercules. It would be the story of an entire network, with the people at one end complete strangers to those at the other end, except for a dim spirit of national identity.

By 2020 two films have been made: "Nine Lives" (1957), which the Norwegians voted in 1991 as the best national film of all time and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film; and "The 12th Man", made 60 years later, without much praise. Both recount how eleven men, responsible of executing the "Operation Martin", were killed and how a twelfth man escaped. In truth, neither of the two movies manages to exceed the average level. However, seeing them, one after the other, is interesting to compare how cinematic storytelling has changed and how at present the stories are full of traps and truculence that distract us from the real meaning of a story.

It is not easy to know which one is more faithful to the facts. The one from 1957 is based on the book "We Die Alone" by David Howarth, a British Navy officer and war correspondent; and the one from 2017 came from the mind of Petter Skavlan, a professional screenwriter who tells the same story in a more violent way. If the 1957 movie lasts 90 minutes, the other one takes two hours and 15 minutes. The first is narrated with economy and restraint, so that we see and at the same time we can reflect on what it meant to overcome adversity in a collective way, with the participation of the Norwegians who opposed the German invasion of his country; while the second leaves little room for simultaneous reflection, overwhelming us with pyrotechnics, and the fictive parallel plot of a Gestapo officer who is obsessed with trapping the fugitive. There were not so many Nazis behind Baalsrud, according to what I have read, nor was the persecution so bloody.

The Germans killed eleven and then concentrated in searching for the twelfth without any show of force. Control was theirs. If in "Nine Lives" eleven men fall in a few minutes, riddled with German shrapnel, the remake takes more than half an hour in which they torture, mutilate and end up shooting the guys. "The 12th Man" has all kinds of traps: a little girl who is present to move us, dialogues that lead to nothing between a member of the resistance and a collaborationist both from the same village, hackneyed sound effects (which I call "the door slamming") ), ominous music, visual effects... Both films illustrate the hallucinations Baalsrud had: in the first film, they confuse the resolution, when we do not know if we are seeing a fantasy or a rescue by a herd of reindeer (one of the most magnificent moments in both films); but in the second one, the visualization of Baalsrud's worst fears reach the level of nonsense, like a montage of ghostly nightmares to scare away anyone who sees it.

Jan Baalsrud disapproved of the 1957 film, because, according to him, it painted him as a "hero" and believed that the true heroes were the ones who helped him escape. I don't think that's the case. There were no heroes here, but human beings and, at most, patriots. He was an incredible survivor and, without that strength that kept him alive for two months, those he calls "heroes" would have had nothing to do. "Nine Lives" gives equal space to those collective fighters and is even more realistic without the excess of blows and torture that we see in its remake.