The Vikings

Hollywood has always gone through cycles of making historical-fiction epics, and the 1958 Kirk Douglas vehicle The Vikings is a product of the same cycle that also produced Spartacus and Solomon and Sheba. Directed by veteran Richard Fleischer (who also did Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja), the movie is very much a product of its time, but also retains a surprising amount of grit and energy.

Adapted from pulp writer Edison Marshall’s 1951 novel The Viking, it is a very loosely-based version of the highly questionable sagas regarding the semi-legendary Ragnar Lodbrok. It is very much of a piece with the melodramatic “historical” adventure stories of the late pulp era. Marshall was a regular in the so-called “Adventure Pulps” of the 40s and 50s. These were the better-paying markets in the pulp field, as they tended to eschew any kind of magical or supernatural elements, and thus were more “serious” than the sort of thing that appeared in Weird Tales.

The movie has a great look, with brilliant cinematography by the great Jack Cardiff. One thing that adds a lot to the film is the dedication Fleischer had to authenticity. Rather than film somewhere in Baja and try to pretend it was Norway, they actually went to Norway, built some highly accurate period longships, and actually sailed them around in the fjords. The sets look great, the armor and weapons are (mostly) pretty accurate, and the climactic siege was filmed at a real castle in Brittany. It gives the whole thing a degree of verisimilitude and immersiveness it otherwise would have lacked.

Ernest Borgnine plays Ragnar, the Viking chieftain, with a lot of gusto – certainly more than I would have expected. Kirk Douglas plays his son Einar, who while given top billing is actually the antagonist of the movie. It’s surprising how he really bites into the role, as Einar is a vicious, cruel bastard with few redeeming qualities. He’s got a great physicality and famously did as many of his own stunts as he could. When he grabs hold of Princess Morgana and growls “If I can’t have your love, then I’ll take your hate” he does it with real conviction.

Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were a couple at the time they made this, and they are both just miscast here. Curtis is a fine looking piece of man, but his major acting style consists of staring off into space like he forgot his own name. He does well enough with the fight scenes though. Leigh is laughable as the Welsh princess Morgana, as she looks about as Welsh as Britney Spears. Nobody is even attempting any kind of accents at all, and while you have some Brit actors to add some ambiance, most of the leads sound like they are just from LA.

The music, overall, is bad. The main theme is a kind of tiresome fanfare that gets repeated and repeated, and the incidental music is forgettable when it is not just out of place. A better score could have really punched this up.

The action scenes are still pretty good, despite being of that particular school of bloodless 50s action. There is plenty of implied gore – like people being fed to starving wolves and getting their hands chopped off – but it always happens off-camera. Nevertheless, the battle scenes, when they finally kick off, have a lot of energy and still manage to be exciting. It helps that the principals really throw themselves into it, and the final showdown between Douglas and Curtis really sells the idea that they want to kill each other.

Watching this, I can kind of see why they tapped Fleischer to direct the second Conan movie and Red Sonja, as his kind of swashbuckling action was the standard ten or twenty years earlier. But the landscape had changed on him, and people wanted bloody, brutal action that just was not what he did. He was making movies for the 50s in the 80s, and missed the mark.

This really harks back to the kinds of adventure fiction that influenced the classic Sword & Sorcery authors. It was historical adventure that led to the popularity of fantasy and added the heavy strain of violence that always runs through a good S&S story. The Vikings may not really be a classic, but it still has legs more than 60 years later.