The Vikings (1958)-Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine and Janet Leigh in a golden age Hollywood adaptation of the 1951 novel by Edison Marshall.
Within 2 hours, the film manages to execute on a grounded political costume drama where there are no clear heroes, only victims of circumstance with conflicting goals that are sometimes in opposition to one another and sometimes aligning to a common cause. I tried to encapsulate this in a paragraph or two but the story is simply so dense with intrigues, hidden plots, secrets and character complexities that many films from today's era can only dream of effectively portraying on the screen.
This was one of those films a few of my friends in our high school gaming group would mention now and again but I never took the time to watch because it was 'old' and I was more into mecha anime than anything else, and I felt those guys were slumming it with typical fantasy fare while I was going outside the norms of the genre so I didn't really take their opinion on anything seriously, and I didn't want to look at old cinema with cheesy music and theatricalities at the time.
Now I would say it's an essential cinema viewing experience. The film is remarkable not only for how it omits the simple heroics of the pablum of the day but also for how much it trusts its audience to understand its emotional subtleties and the undercurrents of its various subtexts. There is one scene in particular where the message is clearly 'blood will tell', no words are spoken but the moment shared between Tony Curtis's escaped slave Eric and Ernest Borgnine's Ragnar Lodbrok is unmistakable in its intentions. Just a knowing, silent exchange followed by a lingering pause on Borgnine's face before he gives the warmest smile in the coldest of circumstances and then goes to meet his fate, whatever that may be.
Like
Dragonslayer and
Ivanhoe, I have to believe that
The Vikings influenced GRRM's creative process. It isn't interested in spoon feeding the audience the message, but simply tells a story about violent people caught up in their own dueling ambitions. There are things to admire about each of them and there are things that one could criticize them for, Leigh's Morgana and Curtis's Eric being the sole possible exceptions since, of all the cast, they are the only two that could rightly be classified as being too much on the receiving end of the harsh cruelties of the viking era. It subverts tropes and tells a far more complex story than I was expecting it to.
The cast is great, making the most of this era of cinema where productions were still mostly shooting as though film was just stage drama on celluloid. The first time you meet any of these characters, you think you're going to get an antiquated performance out of them but within a few minutes you should find yourself warming to this cast and its
dramatis personae. This film made me appreciate Tarantino's frustration at the loss of the 'Hollywood epic'. This movie, produced today, would be soulless and mostly computer generated not out of an effort to produce the best possible film but to save money and cut corners. It would also be ashamed of itself for being what it is in the modern era and would labor to please the suits and their fake social virtue, when it should be proud, threatening and transgressive.
It should also be said that if you've ever watched any of the various and sundry Viking TV or film productions since this movie was made (I believe it may have been the first major historical fictional drama of its kind), then you will clearly see how
The Vikings has influenced everything that came after it. Whether you're a student of cinema and cinematic history or just someone who likes to occasionally catch an old film, you should find somethinig to like about
The Vikings.
Oh, and Janet Leigh can totally get it.
4 out of 5
