Heathen Charity

The Vikings (1958)
directed by Richard Fleischer
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Listening to Richard Fleischer talk about his year in pre-production, flying through fjords and researching Norsemen in the British Library of London, sounds an awful lot like a more confident, smaller Ernest Hemingway relating the stories of his big-game hunts. Fleischer is clearly grateful for the experience, but I've never thought about the degree to which the process of moviemaking is a lifestyle as much as a career. The more cynical interpretation is the unintentional disdain a director who likes to travel must have for the audience who pays money for the final product. By the time The Vikings opened in Tulsa, Fleischer was picking out horse saddles in Montana.

But The Vikings, according to John Carpenter and Debrah Hill, is the reason that Janet Leigh was such a hot commodity in The Fog. Carpenter was ten in 1958, Hill eight, and a one-eyed Kirk Douglas fighting bearded Tony Curtis atop an ancient seaside castle is the perfect (and perfectly ridiculous) movie memory. Again, my cynicism finds it all too easy to ascribe Carpenter's enduring affection for the film to the whole casts' rampant misogyny, but The Vikings is more than your average, lumbering Fleischer Spanish galleon. Orson Welles narrates, the first villain we meet isn't really the villain, and the last hero standing commits so many fratricidal and patricidal slips of the sword (and never, as we would expect, in ignorance of his awful knowledge), that the beautiful concealing fog of those beautiful Scandinavian coastlines - and Borgnine's winking girth - isn't deep enough to slow the agile barbarity of the movie's premise or execution. A gem from someone else's lost youth.