Ni liv; war drama, Norway, 1957; D: Arne Skouen, S: Jack Fjeldstad, Alf Malland, Henny Moan, Joachim Holst-Jensen
Norway during the Nazi occupation. Jan Baalsrud is a resistance member who arrives with his friend to Hansen, a shoemaker, for underground contact, but it turns out the previous Hansen was arrested by the German army, and that the new Hansen doesn't want to have anything to do with the resistance. Hansen secretly snitches them to the Nazis. While Jan and his crew were smuggling arms from the British Shetland islands to Norway's north, their ship is attacked and sunk by the Nazis. Only Jan survives, who walks through the snow landscape and reaches the house of Agnes and Martin, who nurture him. Jan is hidden in a barn, and then under a snowy slope, since the Nazis are searching for every house for him. Finally, a Sami reindeer herder transports Jan in a sleigh over to the neutral Swedish territory, where he is saved.
Based on real life events of Norwegian World War II resistance member Jan Baalsrud, "Nine Lives" is one of the wildest survival and escape stories of its kind, offering moments of surprise and that feeling of persecution from which a person has to escape to another country to safety. Despite its simple and conventional directing, "Nine Lives" still works even today, but it is narrowed down only to this one episode from Baalsrud's life, and does not show his military career before or after it. Nonetheless, his plight and flight depicted here are astonishing, as if he is the original "Norwegian Chuck Norris": he survives in the cold snow mountains; suffers from snow blindness and thus has to throw snowballs in front of himself and tap with his ski pole to find them, blindfolded; he falls down an avalanche; in the barn, since the doctor cannot arrive due to a snow storm, he disinfects a knife on a candle fire and cuts some of his toes infected with gangrene... Indeed, his ability to endure all this hardship while trying to reach Swedish neutral territory is a story that deserves to be told. It is thus not far fetched when the farmers who nurture him have this exchange: "He must have nine lives!" - "And he will need them all." The exteriors of the snow landscapes have a certain aesthetic, and one stylistic idea is interesting: some 14 minutes into the film, the camera pans up through seven different mountains, all showing either Jan's footsteps left on the snow or the Nazi army in a search mission. Some moments are clumsy or heavy handed, and it is somewhat undignified showing Jan in such a unworthy situation, relying too much on others, yet the movie works both as a piece of history and an adventure drama.
Grade:+++