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.

Three Films Make A Post: A family like no other

Spookers (2017): Florian Habicht’s documentary about what is apparently “the most successful scare park in the Southern hemisphere”, family run and populated by performers who have become a wonderful family by choice themselves, is in large parts a love letter to the concept of the family of choice that is so important to most of the broken and the bent among us; it’s also a love letter to strangeness, to people letting out those parts of themselves they have to hide in real life, and being accepted as they are. As a horror fan, I also can’t help but love the film’s many shots of visitors of the place being joyfully scared, glowing with freed emotions.

The filmmakers have a lot of fun of engaging with their subjects in a playful and human way, sharing into their outlet and companionship in a way that seems particular lovely right now and right here, giving a film about a group of people scaring the bejeezus out of others an air of the humane and the hopeful.

Blood of Dracula (1957): This AIP production about the resident (female!) mad scientist at a boarding school turning the new girl into a were-vampire to somehow end the nuclear arms race (I use the word “mad” for a reason) as directed by Herbert L. “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein” Strock is one of the more enjoyable ones from the 50s not touched by the hands of Corman. At least, Strock knows how to pace things properly, structuring things economically.

The script has a decent grip on how a teenage girl after the loss of her mother, and cursed with a father who marries a gold digger only six weeks later, might act and feel, the vampire bit really expressing the return of the things 50s society wants a girl to repress, which is more than you can expect of a late 50s monster movie.

See No Evil (1971): Directed by Richard Fleischer and written by the great Brian Clemens, this is an excellent early 70s thriller about a recently blinded (in a riding accident) character played by Mia Farrow returning to her family’s country home for a spell, only to find herself beset by someone who will turn out to be much worse than your typical stalker. Farrow’s performance adds some spine to her patented victim shtick, so it’s a bit of disappointment she isn’t really saving herself in the end, but the film’s so tightly made, this sort of theoretical problem only comes to mind afterwards. While actually watching the film, I found myself far too involved in excellently built suspense sequences – some of which are truly horrifying in conception, like the one in which Farrow discovers she has been sleeping in a house full of the corpses of her loved ones – to bother about this sort of thing.

Past Misdeeds: The Last Run (1971)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Former professional getaway driver Harry Garmes (George C. Scott very brilliantly being George C. Scott) had retired to a Portuguese fishing village nearly a decade ago. Shortly after coming to the village he lost his child in an accident, and a bit later his wife to another man, leaving him if not dead inside, then emotionally hibernating for a long time.

Now, Harry seems to have decided that enough is enough with the moping, and takes on the job of helping in the escape of con Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) from a Spanish prison. Harry's supposed to pick up Paul while the guards of his chain gang (or whatever the Spanish version of one is called) are distracted by a big damn explosion, and get him over the border to France.

Of course, things don't go quite as planned. It's not just that Paul turns out to be - fitting enough for a professional criminal - a bit of a jerk, he’s a rather dumb one at that, and is willing to risk a detour just to pick up his girlfriend Claudie (Trish Van Devere), who one might imagine to be able to make her way to France on her own. There's also the little problem that the people responsible for Paul's break-out only got him out of jail to kill him once he arrives in France.

At that point, the very lonely Harry has already fallen in love with Claudie - something Paul supports for practical reasons - and is willing to risk the little bit of life he feels he still has to help the couple escape. The trio's best route of escape seems to be to reach Harry's Portuguese home and cross the ocean to Africa on a fishing boat the driver owns. They only need to somehow avoid the horde of killers that's on their trail. Yet even if they manage this, things still may not turn out too well for Harry.

The Last Run's director Richard Fleischer is a peculiar case of a man somtimes only regarded as a work for hire guy of dubious talent (which probably is the kind of reputation you deserve when you end your career directing films like Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer), yet who nonetheless has some fantastic films that look pretty damn personal and auteur-ish in his earlier filmography. Especially some of Fleischer's later RKO noirs and many of the films he made in the late 60s and early 70s are well worth a look, and possibly even worth a snooty remark calling the director a "true auteur" or some such.

Until last year, when Warner decided to finally release the film on one of their overpriced Archives DVD-Rs, it was quite difficult to get a hold of The Last Run at all, so it was easy to believe the critical mauling the film got from people like Roger Ebert (whose competence at understanding genre cinema was basically nil). Fortunately, now that one can see The Last Run  with one's own eyes, one just might be able to see a film that certainly isn't flawless but is also much better than the reviews and its rather pained production history (George C. Scott driving away initial director John Huston! George C. Scott ruining his marriage on set and already working on his new wife! George C. Scott being as difficult as Kinski! Etc.) would lead one to expect.

One of the most criticized elements of the film is the lack of dynamic in its action sequences, but watching them in context, I couldn't help but think their dry, laconic, and utterly naturalistic tone is part of the point of the whole affair. After all, Fleischer (or frequently brilliant scriptwriter Alan Sharp) even sets up an explicit contrast between the old gangster romanticism of classic Hollywood and the much dryer tone of his own film through various dialogue scenes between Musante and Scott and another scene where Musante and Van Devere are watching an old gangster movie.

This does not mean the action scenes are completely unexciting. In fact, if you're willing to accept Fleischer's clear emphasis on staying inside the realm of the physically possible, you'll perhaps find them to be unexpectedly effective at raising your blood pressure. Fleischer's direction of these scenes, and really, of the whole rest of the film too, is wonderfully off-handed and laconic, avoiding all big directorial gestures and all showing off - and not by making this avoidance of showing-off its own grand gesture, either. The director grounds his sparse plot in a believable sense of place, giving as much room to the Spanish landscape his characters drive through as to the things happening in that landscape.


Neither the action scenes nor the crime plot are really what the movie is interested in anyway. I believe these elements are only there at all to fulfil the genre expectations an audience will probably have going in. At its core, though, The Last Run is a film much more interested in exploring the nature of loneliness in middle-aged men and the emotional death it can lead to, the difference between the cynical optimism of youth as embodied by Musante and the - ironically - much less cynical pessimism of Scott's age, and the very existentialist (or Nietzschean, depending on your philosophical favourites) concept of hope as the most destructive emotion of them all - even if the one hoping is as conscious as Scott here of how little importance his hopes carry in the greater picture of the universe.

Three Films Make A Post: Horror so incredible it stretches the mind of man beyond the breaking point!

Armored Car Robbery (1950): Working for RKO's b-unit, Richard Fleischer learned early on some of the virtues that would make him one of the better work-for-hire directors in years to come: an ability to tell a story in the most economical manner while still giving it room to breathe. Case in point is this hard-boiled movie about the hunt for a quartet of armoured car robbers, a film that uses its 67 minutes of runtime to the fullest, trusting in the abilities of a fine cast (particularly Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens and William Talman), and its audience's knowledge of the basics of the genre its working in. I'm tempted to say there's not quite enough depth to Armored Car Robbery but then, like its title, this is a movie that is all about a slick, polished surface that already says all there is to say.

The Crimes Of The Black Cat aka Sette Scialli Di Seta Gialla (1972): For most of its running time, Sergio Pastore's giallo comes down on the side of the giallo as a murder mystery, using a lot of favourite giallo bits and bobs (the amateur detective, fashion models as the main victim group, the black-gloved killer) in an entertaining, yet also somewhat conservative and certainly not lurid manner. Which is a curious thing to say about a movie about a blind composer (played by old wooden face Anthony Steffen with a quiet intensity of obsession I'm not surprised anymore now that I've seen him in enough movies where he actually acts) hunting a killer who uses a black cat as his murder weapon, but there you have it.

The film only becomes truly lurid and crazy with its last murder and final plot twist; fortunately, as the very solid and stylish suspense scene surrounding that final twist and luridness demonstrate, Pastore is well equipped to make a perfectly fun film even without the lurid and the crazy whose absence so often breaks a giallo.

Eyeball (1975): This one is generally treated as one of Umberto Lenzi's best giallos but I can't say I see it. Sure, there's a killer in a stylish red raincoat haunting Barcelona stealing eyeballs, but the red raincoat is as stylish as anything here gets, and the eyeball-stealing less lurid than is sounds. Meanwhile the plot slowly plods along, the mystery bores a bit, and the murders just aren't all that interesting. It's an okay film to watch if you don't have anything exciting at hand, but that's as far as it goes for me.

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On WTF: The Last Run (1971)

Oh, it's the film that helped destroy George C. Scott's marriage! The Last Run is also (by critical consensus of ye olden tymes) supposed to be not a good movie at all.

Seen through my eyes, it's an excellent example of existentialist (kinda-sorta) action cinema with a great cast doing great work. I'll explain why in my column on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,crime,action,richard fleischer,george c. scott,tony musante,trish van devere,other places