The Red Tent
The Red Tent
G | 23 December 1969 (USA)
The Red Tent Trailers

Torn by personal guilt, Italian General Umberto Nobile reminisces about his 1928 failed Arctic expedition aboard the airship Italia.

Reviews
Develiker terrible... so disappointed.
Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
slightlymad22 The Red Tent (1969)Plot In A Paragraph: Torn by personal guilt Italian General Umberto Nobile (Peter Finch) reminisces about his 1928 failed Arctic expedition aboard the airship Italia.Not many people have seen this movie, it runs a little too long, and it's not what I'd call an enjoyable movie, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good one. The entire movie takes place in the generals mind. He calls back various participants to the events, to re-live what happened, and then ultimately pass judgement on him. It's well directed, well acted and it has a nice score tooAttempting to rid himself from Bond, it is the first time Connery would play the wiser, older man, he turns up late on, in what is only a supporting role (at best) or a glorified cameo. The Red Tent was another Connery movie to fail at the box office.
keachs 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.
tedg 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.
Kirasjeri "The Red Tent", as it was called when released in most of the world, is a fascinating historical epic of Arctic exploration. In the 1920's, Italian General Nobile sought to be the first to fly over the North Pole in a dirigible, of all things! Much of the movie focuses on these efforts; unfortunately, the winds kick up and the air ship is ripped apart. Surviving crewmen end up in various locations on the ice and then procede to battle the elements and polar bears. The great arctic explorer Raoul Amundsen is called in as are the Soviets who pick up radio messages of the disaster; an ice breaker is then dispatched to assist in the rescue. Yes, it is an involved and realistiuc spectacle.Peter Finch is very good as Nobile, and so is Connery as Amundsen - and it's an historic well-known fact that the first man to reach the South Pole, Amundsen, vanished in his attempt to save Nobile.Of note is that the story is recounted in flashback much later in a sort of trial of Nobile in his home in Rome, as characters living and dead appear to confront or defend him. Whether or not Nobile was reckless or had bad luck, or just over reached himself, is for the viewer to determine from putting the stories together.Somewhat long and overinvolved this is still an engrossing account of an epic Arctic disaster and the heroic rescue attempts that followed. If you see it, GRAB it.