Film Review: The Vikings
How Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh saved early medieval Northumbria
Harken back to the bad old days of Technicolor film The Vikings when men were real men, women were real women and a cast of thousands was a real cast of thousands.
In The Vikings (1958) Kirk Douglas (Einar) and Tony Curtis (Eric) play Viking half-brothers in a feud to the death in 10th century Britain. Seems Einar's dad Ragnar (Ernest Bognine, of all people) raped Eric's Welsh mum and killed her husband (a local king) during a raid. She bears the child in secret and has him fostered elsewhere to keep him from being strangled in his cradle by his Herod of a stepfather, Aella (named after a real English king who died four centuries earlier). She soon dies and Eric is sold into slavery. After growing up, he gets into a feud with Einar over the throne Eric should have had in Northumbria. But what's really fueling the sibling rivalry is their mutual lust for the fetching blonde Welsh princess Morgana (played by Janet Leigh for her sins) and the fact that Eric once blinded Einar in a fight.
Got all that?
Naturally, it's utter tosh. Douglas and Curtis look nothing alike, even for polar-opposite half-brothers. The Welsh were more usually brunettes than blondes like the Vikings (think Catherine Zeta Jones). Plus, Aella's stone castle is at least four centuries too early for even a 12th-century Norman castle (like, say, Carrickfergus), which isn't Viking design, anyway. Think of the wooden stockade on an earth-banked hill in The 13th Warrior (1999) for a more period-appropriate defensive system. And what is up with Einar's leather trousers?
But, you've got some good historical insight into medieval psychology with Douglas' ferocious portrayal of Einar. One memorable scene shows him running along a Viking dragon ship's oars over the water, laughing at the obvious danger. Recent offerings like King Arthur (2004), Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and even A Knight's Tale (2001) portray their heroes as pretty, moody, angsty and pensive. Please. Successful medieval warriors weren't stupid, but they didn't brood like Hamlet, either. And good looks were no requirement. As Douglas ably shows, a key element in successful warriors from Charlemagne to El Cid to Vlad the Impaler was a level of ferocity that makes us uncomfortable today.
So, naturally, Einar is the bad guy and naturally, he has to die in the end. When it comes right down to it, Vikings still scare us.
