Soldier of Orange
Short description
Soldier of Orange follows a group of Dutch students whose lives are reshaped by the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. At the centre is Erik Lanshof, and around him five close friends who respond to the occupation in sharply different ways, ranging from armed resistance to被动 compliance and outright collaboration. The film traces how these choices pull the men apart and test the bonds they formed before the war.
Paul Verhoeven directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Kees Holierhoek and Gerard Soeteman. It is the third of the sixteen films he has directed in chronological order, arriving between Katie Tippel in 1975 and Spetters in 1980. Rutger Hauer plays Erik Lanshof, with Jeroen Krabbé, Lex van Delden, Derek de Lint, Huib Rooymans and Dolf de Vries among the principal cast; fifty actors are credited in total. Rob Houwer produced the film, which was made for a budget of about five million dollars and runs 148 minutes.
On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 7.6 from roughly 15,000 votes, while on TMDB it has a rating of 7.1 from 183 votes. A film critics' rating of 7.8 from twelve reviews sits close to the audience scores, indicating that professional and general viewers have assessed it in similar terms.
What's left behind the scenes
- At the time, it was the most expensive Dutch film to be made. Considering the scale of the project and the limited budget, the time directly allocated to filming was limited. Often, a shooting day lasted 18 hours. It is claimed that some scenes were shot for 36 hours straight.
- The television version has a runtime of 215 minutes.
- Producer Rob Houwer re-edited the film for foreign markets, doing so without the knowledge of director Paul Verhoeven. According to Verhoeven, this re-edited version with a different title ("Survival Run") was almost an hour shorter. It contained only action scenes without explanations or historical context, and was dubbed by British actors. Houwer even claimed he preferred his version to the original director's cut. If his version had gained distribution, Verhoeven’s hopes for international recognition would likely have ended, but producer, director, actor and screenwriter Dan Ireland intervened. He had already seen the original version and was so impressed that he showed it to Steven Spielberg. This is why American distributors demanded the original version of the film, not Houwer's re-edit, and soon nominated it for a Golden Globe Award (presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association). Verhoeven remains grateful to Ireland to this day, rightly believing that he owes his success in the US to him.
- The explosions in the film were not handled by civilian specialists, but by soldiers of the Dutch army. According to director and screenwriter Paul Verhoeven, one of the explosions nearly killed Rutger Hauer, who played the lead role.
- Reik de Gooyer, who played Brightner, was in the Resistance during World War II and therefore felt a certain animosity towards Reinhardt Kollhoff (who played the Wehrmacht general). This animosity went so far that, before filming a joint scene, Reik de Gooyer fired a gas pistol right next to Kollhoff.
- At the beginning of the film, Queen Wilhelmina (played by Andrea Domburg) arrives in the Netherlands with adjutant Erik Lanshof (Rutger Hauer) after liberation at the end of World War II. In this episode, specially filmed footage is combined with authentic newsreel footage shot by American and Dutch cameramen. The footage shows Wilhelmina with an adjutant named Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema (the author of the 1971 novel that served as the literary source for the screenplay). To add authenticity to the modern footage supplementing the newsreel, the filmmakers enlisted the services of a man who voiced Danish newsreels in the post-war period, so his voice is heard on screen in the film.
- The entire film was shot on location, with the exception of a short scene in a Royal Air Force bomber.
- While playing Wilhelmina, Andrea Domburg held cotton balls in her cheeks, just as Marlon Brando did in the role of Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's crime drama 'The Godfather' (1972).
- A more accurate translation of the title is "The Queen's Soldier".
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