The Vikings (1958)

Warning: there’s more implied backstory and story rape in this one than on-screen in most pinkus

After Orson Welles and a pretty cool animation have schooled us about some Viking Facts™ – few of which were close to historical facts even when this was made – and the film has prologued us with fifteen minutes of information it’ll need to repeat anyway, because most of the characters have no clue about what’s going on in their lives, the film slowly comes to the actual meat of its tale.

Ragnar Lodbrok (Ernest Borgnine, I kid you not) rules a bunch of Vikings as their rapist king, helped out by his pretty-faced (and also rapist) son LL Einar (Kirk Douglas, who was actually a couple of months older then Borgnine, and not as you know not pretty). They rape, they pillage, they terrorize the British Isles, you know the deal. Three, ahem, I mean two decades ago, Ragnar captured himself a baby slave named Eric (now grown up to be played by Tony Curtis). Eric, as we know thanks to the pointless prologue but the characters will have to find out about throughout the film, is actually the product of one of Ragnar’s rape sprees, his mother being the former Queen of Northumbria. He’s also not at all friendly with his secret half-brother. Early in the movie, he’s going so far as attacking Einar with a falcon who comes from the Fulci school of falcons and promptly mutilates one of Einar’s eyes, also making him unpretty (the film indeed suggesting that Kirk Douglas was pretty before).

Attempts of getting rid of Eric afterwards are thwarted by Odin, who’d really rather want the film to be longer than fifty minutes. Relations do stay strained, though, and once Einar kidnaps Welsh princess Morgana (Janet Leigh) and both men fall for her, things certainly don’t improve. Morgana does prefer Eric (one supposes that him not wishing to rape her helps there too), even more so once he absconds with her in the direction of the British Isles. It could be the beginning of a wonderful love affair, if not for the fact that Morgana is promised to the – decidedly nasty – King of Northumbria, Aella (Frank Thring doing a wonderful Vincent Price imitation), and is not one to go back on the word of her father. Lots and lots of further melodramatic reversals of fate happen, until Eric and Einar even team up to rescue Morgana from Northumbria, before they go back to try and kill each other again.

After this, do I even have to say that Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings is a deeply silly movie, as well as the kind of film where playing a drinking game based on historical inaccuracies could be downright deadly? But then, who goes into a movie where Ernest Borgnine plays the father of Kirk Douglas, and all two, plus Tony Curtis (who is also meant to be kinda macho), are supposed to be Vikings expecting any kind of historical realism? This is the realm of pure adventure fantasy, and really needs to be approached as taking place on that much better plane.

Once you’ve put things into the proper perspective, you actually might get quite a bit of fun out of the whole affair. Sure, some contemporary tastes will certain shy away from the amount of sexual violence that must have happened in the backstory and which Einar would just love to commit onscreen. The film’s very heavily implying that Ragnar and Einar both can’t get it up properly with a willing partner and even have love and violence all mixed up in their tiny little brains. I’m honestly not at all sure how the filmmakers got away with that one.

However, the film is at least not pro rape at all (not necessarily a matter of course in 50s cinema), but clearly implying the problem with Ragnar and Einar isn’t that they’re not Christian, or barbarians (most Christian non-barbarians in the film are not much better going by modern, hell, even 50s morals than these two, in fact) but that they’re rapists.

This is of course all background matter for the film, and not even I would argue this is in any way, shape or form its main interest.

Which brings us to its main interest: rousing, swashbuckling adventure full of silly ideas (just look at the infamous boat rowing scene for the last one), cast with actors who really do know how to throw themselves into all kinds of on-screen derring-do. Fleischer does stage the big action set pieces very nicely indeed, making great use of the full Technicolor screen particular in the last half hour or so, and generally finds something interesting to film even when guys aren’t hitting each other with swords and axes.

The production design, while historically dubious, is often rather wonderful, too. There has clearly been some love put into the little details that make something look more impressive, so we get things like every Viking shield having its own, individual ornamentation and many other worldbuilding details hidden and not so hidden in the backgrounds. This helps make all the silly adventure and melodrama feel rooted, and provides The Vikings with quite a bit of visual magic even after all these decades.