1958, United States. Starring Kirk Douglas, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Randal, Janet Leigh, James Donald, Alexander Knox. Directed by Richard Fleischer. Available on DVD from Amazon

So Big Fish is full of heart and spirit and yes, even magic. It touches the soul and brings joy to the heart even of this tired man. But you know what else brings joy to my heart? Guys with swords yelling about Valhalla and pillaging the English coast. Although The Vikings has its core the story of a another family reconciliation - that of the relationship between two estranged brothers who, in fact, aren't even aware they're related - it opts to take the less tender route and unfold itself amid the carnage and gusto of the Viking raiding parties that plagues the English coasts during the middle ages. Yes, folks, it's time for big overblown epic theater again, and who better to star in it than Kirk Douglas and his craggy, inhumanly manly chin?

Simply put, this is a movie that swaggers into the room and boisterously proclaims, "I'm gonna entertain the hell out of you!" then proceeds to go ahead and do just that. It probably says that to you in Kirk Douglas' voice, too, which is fine. That's the way it should be. While not entirely devoid of depth or message, such things exist in The Vikings almost by accident, or purely because they make the real point of the movie - which is testosterone-fuelled swashbuckling, hearty laughter, the waving of mead mugs in the smoky air, and sweeping romantic adventure - all the more delicious.

Tony Curtis, who is sometimes confused with Tony Randal because they are both named Tony and young kids don't remember either of them, stars as Eric, the proverbial slave who grows up unaware of the fact that he is the true and rightful heir to some misty throne on the English coast. Years prior, he was sent away by a conniving relative so someone evil could inherit the throne -yeah, that old chestnut. Eric eventually wound up in the service of great Viking hero Einar (Douglas), who has a tendency to act all manly, jump up onto tables, that sort of thing. You know, macho hero stuff. Einar's father is Ragnar, played in hairy man-beast glory by Ernest Borgnine, casually ignoring the fact that Borgnine is actually a year younger than Douglas. Hey, who can tell when you slap wooly barbarian hair all over a guy and have him tearing away wildly at one of those gigantic King Henry's Feast turkey legs? What no one realizes is that Ragnar is also Eric's father, owing to some of that patented Viking raping and pillaging we heard so much about.


Although unaware of his royal lineage, Eric is still none to happy with the life of a slave. When some uppityness causes Einar's eye to be clawed out by a falcon, it would seem to be curtains for poor ol' Eric. Luckily, a British visitor to the court of Ragnar convinces the Vikings not to kill the young man, and your standard-issue cackling old crone and neighborhood soothsayer concurs. So what can they do? Stymied in their efforts to kill Eric, the Vikings return to cavorting and table-overturning and drinking, all the while laughing, laughing, laughing! Over the course of the film, the Vikings will decide to kidnap an English king's bride-to-be, which you know means Eric will meet her and fall in love with her, as well Einar, because it wasn't enough to have just the falcon thing between them. And Eric will escape his Viking captors only to discover the treachery of so-called civilized men. And will there be a big ol' battle at the end full of men dashing up walls and waving swords and flinging flaming balls of garbage from catapults? What? Haven't you seen one of these movies before?

As you probably know by now, I'm a "cast of thousands" epic movie fiend, and The Vikings really is one of the rip-roaring best and most exciting of them all. It's fist-pounding, chest-beating adventure through and through, the kind that will and damn well should make modern folk ashamed that they are so pitiful and know not the glory and the laughter that echoes through the halls of Valhalla and the passions and hates and loves that all burn as brilliant as a thousand white-hot suns. As is always the case with a good epic, it is life on a grand scale, blown up to 70mm and taking the emotion with it on that grand scale. Nothing in The Vikings is small, nothing low-key. This is epic filmmaking at its most epic, and director Richard Fleischer deftly brings this grand vision of the bloody past to the screen amid a flurry of historical accuracy that was rare in a type of film that tended to cast Jesus as blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Hollywood epics of the golden age from the 1950s to the 1960s weren't exactly history textbooks, though a few did try and raise the bar in being accurate with their depiction of the times. Earlier, we reviewed 300 Spartans, another Hollywood epic that strove for a high degree of historical accuracy. The primary difference between that movie and this one is that at times 300 Spartans felt almost like a reenactment of a tactical manual, so precise was it in presenting the military maneuvers in the Battle of Thermopolae. The Vikings maintains detailed historical settings and costumes and customs, but has a lot more fun with everything. Fleischer was already becoming an old salt at handling historic and fantastic settings, having staged large-scale period fantasies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (also featuring Kirk Douglas). He'd go on to helm a number of fair to above-average epics and fantasy films, including Fantastic Voyage, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Barrabas, Solyant Green, and less respectably, Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja.

Teaming here with cinematographer Jack Cardiff, he's wrought a truly overwhelming vision of the past. Cardiff's career as a cinematographer dates as far back as the 1935 version of The Last Days of Pompeii, and his filmography includes some absolutely magnificent work: Scott of the Antarctic, The African Queen, War and Peace, and, umm, Rambo: First Blood Part II. As a director he also went on to helm his own big Viking epic a couple years after this film. His was entitled The Long Ships, and yes, we'll be coming to it soon enough. He also directed cult fave Girl on a Motorcycle.

Filmed on location in Norway and other dramatic northern landscapes, The Vikings is an opulent visual feast, as all good epics should be. The landscapes are as big and rowdy and magnificent as the men sailing to and from around them, and the cinematography is simply gorgeous as it soars from mist-shrouded seas to craggy Scandinavian fjords - though none be so craggy as Kirk Douglas' chin. Color is vibrant, music is booming, and everything is on an immense scale. Viking abodes, clans, and ships were all painfully reconstructed from historical sources, and when inaccuracies do creep in, they go unnoticed by anyone who isn't the type of person to proclaim a movie worthless because it's set in the 8th or 9th century but clearly features 14th century English castles.

So you have big places. You also need big actors, larger than life personalities who can thunder and chew scenery and go just enough over the top so as to be memorable and grandiose but not so over the top that you think you're watching William Shatner. Enter Kirk Douglas, a year after his spectacular turn in Paths of Glory and a couple years yet away from his biggest epic role in Spartacus. Douglas seethes and hisses and laughs as he engages in every type of ax-throwing manly action you can think of. Ostensibly set up as the villain of the piece and foil to the more noble (read: whimpier) Eric, The Vikings never proves quite so easy to peg down as to keep Einar as it's unquestioned villain. In fact, one of the film's best features is the bait and switch regarding the "good guys" of the piece. Following Douglas step for blustering step is Ernest Borgnine as the Viking chieftain Ragnar. His final scene, in which he leaps with a heroic shout and laugh into a pit of wild dogs, is one of the best in the movie, and really one of the best scenes in any epic.

The English princess is played by Janet Leigh, and it's a coincidence that we mention her in a review so close to the date of her recent passing. To say the very least, Leigh is every bit as beautiful and breath-taking as Douglas is macho and swaggering, and certainly hers is an attractiveness grand enough for such a big film. She also gets to add a little feistiness to the role of damsel in distress, though if you think she's going to pick up a sword in the finale and start commanding troops, you'd best wait until we get our reviews of all those Joan of Arc movies (I think they're coming up before year's end). If there is a weak link in the cast, it's Tony Curtis, but isn't it always the hero who proves to be the least interesting character?

That's the curse of the epic. The villains have to be larger than life and the assorted characters have to be larger than life, and that all includes untold amounts of mayhem and daring-do and manliness. The hero, unfortunately, has to be epically noble and heroic, which usually means staring off solemnly at the horizon while Kirk Douglas is doing circus tricks with an ax and Ernest Borgnine is hollerin' and jumping into pits full of crazed wolves. Really, who are you going to remember in the morning? The hardy Vikings with their songs and their ale and their Valkyrie or the guy who sat in the corner, polite enough, and made a compass? That Curtis is a weak link in the cast is by no fault of his own. It's just the unfortunate nature of the "epic nice guy hero." His performance is fine by any standards, but sandwiched in between sniveling English kings and sword-swinging Viking adventurers, he just sort of gets lost in the chaos.


One expects large-scale battle scenes in these types of movies, and The Vikings has some of the best. It was a huge hit at its time, proclaimed by some as the Braveheart of its day, though I tend to think more of Braveheart as The Vikings of its day, only with more mud and less cleft chin. The Vikings boasts several great battle scenes, but the best is always the last, and the assault on the treacherous English king's fortress is one for the record books. Great stuff, really, expertly edited and fast paced without, as I always have to point out, resulting to the irritating modern technique of swinging the camera wildly back and forth and up close to the action in an attempt to "make you feel like you're in the thick of things." All I can say to that is, when you are running or in the thick of anything, does your head jerk violently back and forth like these cameras? Do you ever run with your head flopping wildly about the way directors shake these cameras for "point of view realism?" No, so pull back and let us see the damn action next time.

As I said in a previous paragraph, the thing that keeps this from being "just another Hollywood epic" is the twist it puts on expectations. You'd think with the Vikings introduced as pillagers and raiders along the English coast, as murderers, thieves, rapists, and Pagans preying on defenseless "civilized" Christians, that they'd be the bad guys. But The Vikings is smart enough to know that a wild bunch of Norsemen in furry vests are a lot more interesting than some guy with a little page boy haircut and silky purple robes, so the film quickly shifts focus to the bravery of the Vikings and the purity of their passion. They seize life and drink deep from its bountiful horn, or something to that effect, while the English king hides behind a mask of civility but is, in fact, a sniveling, backstabbing coward in need of a righteous Pagan ass-whuppin'. Christianity itself is never called entirely to task, which would have probably been just too much at the time, but we're certainly led to admire the wild, wooly Pagan way of life when Erik and Einar put aside their personal differences and team up to sock it to the wretched lord who needs socking. The final showdown, then, between the two brothers is action-packed, fast-paced, and even a little poignant.

The Vikings isn't a subtle film. It has romance and love, sure, but it's that sweeping kind of romance that gets lost in the romance of adventure. This is big stuff, bigger than most, and perhaps the biggest ever made until Ben Hur the following year and Spartacus the year after that. If modern action cinema has you down, then grab this two-fisted, broadsword-swinging blast from the past and be happy. Grand melodrama, striking cinematography, awe-inspiring locations, and an all-star cast as giant as the world around them make for one hell of a good time at the movies.

Labels: Historical Epics, Netflix Diary