Despite
their reputation in horror films, Hammer Studios did make other kinds
of movies, including quite a few crime thrillers and dramas, they
only made a few ventures into genuine adventure films – mostly in
the form of some fun but minor pirate movies (The Pirates of Blood
River) – and this one, their sole effort at the so-called
“Sword & Sandal” picture, which was rather popular at the
time, and would seem to have been a good move for them.
Released
in 1967, The Viking Queen has nothing whatever to do with
vikings, being a rather loosely-based retelling of the Iceni revolt
around AD 60, when there were no proper Vikings to be found anywhere.
There is a hint in the film that the titular Salina is the daughter
of some kind of Nordic princess married to the Briton king Priam, but
that’s the only reasoning you get for the name.
We
open with Roman Britain, and the Iceni have been placed under
Imperial rule. Dying King Priam agrees to a treaty that leaves equal
power to both the Roman Emperor and his chosen successor, his
daughter Salina, passing over his other two daughters in a kind of
reverse-Lear move. One of his daughters is power-hungry and pissed
off and wants to revolt against the Romans, and the chief of the
druids, Maelgan (played with wonderful overacted fanaticism by Donald
Houston) also wants a rebellion.
The
crux of the movie is that Salina is in love with the Roman governor,
Justinian, and they both want a peaceful coexistence, while seemingly
no one else does. Salina’s sister conspires with the druids to
whip up rebellions, while Justinian’s second-in command, Octavian,
seemingly wants nothing more than to rape and pillage everything in
sight. Octavian is the real villain of the piece, portrayed with
wonderfully oily contempt by Andrew Keir, who went on to memorable
turns in Quatermass and the Pit and Blood From the Mummy’s
Tomb.
Things
predictably go south rapidly, and Queen Salina is accused of treason
and flogged in a brutal scene that is still kind of hard to watch.
Then we have a full-blown uprising, with horse charges, chariots, and
a final, tragic ending.
Directed
competently by Don Chaffey (One Million Years BC, Pete’s Dragon)
the movie didn’t do well in the box office and seems to have
snuffed out forever the idea of Hammer making more like it. You can
see why it failed, as while it has some good parts, it is overall
very slow, with almost the entire first half taken up with political
maneuvering and the forced love story, which doesn’t work at all.
The whole film was marketed as a brutal, savage adventure, while the
script is leaning much harder on the doomed love story. But the
actors don’t have any chemistry at all, and when they are supposed
to be mooning at each other and talking about how in love they are,
it just comes across as tremendously awkward.
Once
the revolt gets swinging, things pick up, and you get some genuinely
good charioteering scenes, which for once manage to make chariots
look fun and cool. The battle scenes are okay, nothing amazing, and
there is very little blood to be seen. The Roman armoring and
costuming is solid, but the look of the Britons is just kind of vague
and uninteresting.
The
acting is a mixed bag. Finnish model Carita is surprisingly good as
the central character, but Don Murray as Justinian is just miscast.
Patrick Troughton is here in a supporting role (apparently he got the
call to play Doctor Who while he was filming this movie), and the
lovely Nicola Pagett gets to ride around on a chariot and stab
people, quite a change from her more numerous drawing-room roles.
There will be quite a few familiar faces in the background if you are
at all a fan of Hammer films, and overall the performances are
neither better nor worse than one usually gets in the movies from
this period.
You
would think that this kind of barbarian epic, with its casual
near-nudity and violence, would have been a good fit for a studio
like Hammer, who were using a similar formula over on the horror side
to great success. I think this movie was just overall not lurid
enough to live up to the sensational promises of the poster. I wish
we had gotten more, better films in this vein from Hammer, and I
wonder what would have happened if they had decided to adapt some
Howard stories, or even do some Solomon Kane movies. I mean can you
imagine? That would have been amazing.
Hammer doing Howard?
ReplyDeleteI would have paid to see that! Especially Solomon Kane; I think that Hammer would have been a natural fit for those.
I know, right?
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