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The overture scans medieval tapestries, flat services that yield to a curtain savagely pulled back, the brutish face filling the screen is unshorn and helmeted but unmistakably Ernest Borgnine's. "The wrath of the Northmen" is vividly illustrated with a raid on Northumbria, which leaves a vacant throne seized by the king's cousin (Frank Thring) and a violated queen (Maxine Audley) pregnant with an illegitimate child. The boy grows up in a Viking village as a slave (Tony Curtis), his unwitting half-brother is the local bellicose heir, Kirk Douglas at his most gleefully loutish. Between them is the beautiful kidnapped princess (Janet Leigh), leered at through the barbarian's glass eye. "I'll give this little wench from Wales a reason to bite and scratch." Richard Fleischer's bravura technique is keyed to the pagan virility onscreen, the Technirama image is a colossal oil canvas made to tremble with impassioned activity. (Bruegel bacchanals, Ivan the Terrible pageantry, the camera just above the foam of misty fjords, Jack Cardiff's cinematography encompasses all.) Christian stateliness contrasts with such heathen divertissements as "Odin's test for faithful wives," the split is from Lang's Die Nibelungen duology. The wooden serpent head materializes in the haze, vessels drift into the "poison sea" while in the foreground the old prophetess consults the runes. (A rare joke literalizes the bodice-ripper subgenre, the prisoner has trouble rowing due to tight garments, her savior tears apart the back of her dress and orders her to take up an oar.) The ruler who lives by the pit full of wolves dies by the pit full of wolves. "Ah, you see? The English are civilized." Love and hate like "horns on the same goat," resolved with swords atop the castle turret before a looming ocean. Certainly a model of composition for Mann's later spectacles, to say nothing of Cardiff's own The Long Ships. With James Donald, Alexander Knox, Eileen Way, Edric Connor, Dandy Nichols, and Per Buckhøj.
--- Fernando F. Croce |