The Vikings

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the longevity of films.  As I have gotten older and talked about movies with today's youth, such as my company's interns, I have been shocked about the movies they have not seen.  At first, I thought the problem was with them or with their parents for doing a bad job raising them.  But sadly, I can no longer delude myself into thinking that's the case.  I think I am just getting old...and I've reached the point in my life where the movies that everyone has seen are...well, movies that a lot of people have actually not seen and maybe haven't even heard of.  Some of the younger people I've talked with do have a vague notion of the popular movies of my day.  They've at least know Back to the Future, even if they haven't seen it.  But there are a lot of movies they just haven't heard of.  For example, just picking two hit movies at random: The Usual Suspects and Four Weddings and a Funeral were both award-winning films and big financial and critical successes.  When I mention these two films to the next generation, I am met with blank eyes.

So what makes a movie stand the test of time?  And I don't mean to film buffs, but to the everyday, average person.  Of the most successful films of 1942/1943, why is Casablanca the one that has gone down in history?  Why not Random Harvest, Reap the Wild Wind, Road to Morocco, Song of Bernadette, or Somewhere I'll Find You.  ALL of those movies were bigger hits than Casablanca (according to Wikipedia). Now, I know that is an extreme example.  Casablanca has became part of the culture, inspiring imitations ranging from Neil Simon to Bugs Bunny.  But it is still an interesting question.  In 1948, Samson and Delilah made $28 million dollars. That is almost $300 million today.  And I think most people will not have heard of that movie, much less seen it.  And I don't mean to equate money with longevity, but it is crazy to me that a movie that was that big of a hit has started to vanish in the public consciousness.  I've asked young men and women if they have heard of Ghost.  The answer is no.  Ghost made $217 million dollars in 1990.  In 1990, that is HUGE.  Today, that is $419 million.  The film was also nominated for five Oscars, included Best Picture, and it won two of them.  And it has completely disappeared?

I suppose what this all comes down to is, I owe my parents an apology.  Because I was one of those kids.  I must have made them feel so old when they talked about the popular movies of their day.  When I was young in the 1980s, they would tell me about a movie... something like Tammy and the Bachelor, and I would laugh and say there is no way that was a big movie.  I would have heard of it if it was.  Tammy and the Bachelor, by the way, was a romantic comedy starring Debbie Reynolds and Leslie Nielsen and it was an Oscar nominated hit that spawned three sequels.  Three sequels.  All erased by our cultural amnesia.  And it is shame because a lot of great films are being lost.  Yes, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and The Godfather will always be with us.  But what about the lesser movies?  What about the movies that aren't even classics, but are just fun rides?  What about strange curiosities like The Vikings?

First, let's establish the credentials.  The Vikings was the sixth most successful movie at the box office in 1958 and was fairly well reviewed.  It had a big enough impact on Hollywood that the early 1960s were littered with cheesy ripoffs like The Long Ships and Erik the Conqueror.  The movie also had a terrific cast, featuring Kirk Douglas (Spartacus), Ernest Borgnine (Marty), Tony Curtis (Some Like It Hot) and Janet Leigh (Psycho).  It was directed by Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), shot by brilliant cinematographer Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus) and written by Calder Willingham (The Graduate).  That is an excellent team.

It seems the epic Kirk Douglas film that has stood the test of time is Spartacus, and there is good reason for that, but let's not ignore The Vikings because this movie is one helluva good time.  I would never call it a classic, but it certainly deserves to be remembered.

The Vikings is the story of two half brothers: Einar (Douglas) is the handsome, popular son of the Viking chief Ragnar (Borgnine) and Eric (Curtis) is a slave in the village, and the unknown son of Ragnar and the English queen he had raped two decades earlier.  The new English king, the villainous Aella (Frank Throng), now watches the coast warily for another Viking attack.  When Einar captures Aella's bride-to-be, Morgana (Leigh), events spiral out of control, setting the two half-brothers against each other and the English crown.

I do want to make it clear that this movie is not perfect.  There are some really goofy and dated things in this movie. For example, I don't really buy the love story between Eric and Morgana.  While Eric is a prince, neither he nor Morgana know that, and I have trouble believing the princess would fall in love so quickly with a slave, even if he is played by Tony Curtis.  The whole subplot is convenient in a very 1950s way where chaste love will always win the day.  There are also some uncomfortable spots where it seems the film is condoning the abuse of women.  Are we supposed to be laughing along with Ragnar when he tells his son that if a women struggles against his advances, that makes the conquest more worth it?  That really bothers me, and is hard to overlook.  But then again, I understand that this very well may have been what the Vikings really felt - pillaging, murder and rape were basically in their job description. So I understand that, but at the same time, it makes it hard to sympathize with certain characters when they talk like that.

But ultimately, in other ways, the treatment of the Vikings themselves is what makes this movie so interesting, and better than many 1950s films of this genre.  Most period adventure films of the period were clear in their villains and heroes.  Everything was very black and white and easily digestible. And The Vikings does have this element.  Eric is the brave and handsome slave who is really a prince. Aella is the villainous and scenery chewing king who sits on Eric's rightful throne.  Morgana is the wholesome princess who needs rescuing.  All very 1950s adventure.  But the difference with The Vikings is actually the titular characters - the rampaging Northmen themselves.  They are the ultimate wild card.  They are not heroes or villains.  They are, well, Vikings.  And yes, they raid and pillage the poor and innocent English.  But they also bring the booty back where it is distributed to families in their own village.  They aren't a cartoonish tribe.  They have a society and a culture, neither good or bad.  They just exist.  And it may be hard not to judge them by our modern standards, but it is impossible to classify them into classic movie archetypes.   In short, the movie gives us as realistic a depiction of Viking society as they can, and implant it in the middle of this silly 1950s adventure.  A lot of research went into this film.  The clothes, ships, buildings and weapons were all created to be as historically accurate as possible, and the hard work pays off.  These Vikings feel sort of authentic.  Not completely authentic, of course.  It is still a movie, after all, and there is only so realistic you can be in Hollywood.  But it is still pretty impressive to see these characters and not know how they fit into the puzzle or what actions they will take.

I also admire that the movie is surprisingly brutal for a film from this era.  A bit of a SPOILER alert here, but I was not expecting Einer's eye to get gouged out.  And I certainly didn't expect Eric's arm to get hacked off.  The movie isn't particularly graphic.  This doesn't happen on camera, but still...I was genuinely surprised.  And I don't get surprised easily.

I also have to take a second and mention the climactic battle at the end, when the Viking army assaults Aella's castle.  This bloody attack is terrific, well staged by Fleischer and superbly shot by Cardiff.  I especially respect the final duel between Einar and Eric, an energetic and dangerous fight on top of the castle's tower that looks way too high to be safe for either the actors or the crew. 

So all in all, despite its flaws, The Vikings is a fun and exciting movie, featuring a cast and crew at the top of their game.  Is it a classic?  Definitely not.  But does it deserve to be forgotten?  I don't think so.  There are hundreds of movies that are slowly fading into cultural oblivion.  Movie lovers out there can't let that happen.  We have to tell our family and friends, and pester them until they see some of these movies, and hopefully continue to pass them on to the next generation.  There are a lot of fun, forgotten movies out there.  I hope The Vikings does not become one of them...


MVP:

There are a lot of things I like about The Vikings, but I have to give the MVP to cinematographer Jack Cardiff.  Cardiff is one of the best directors of photography in Hollywood history, with a career spanning seven decades.  Cardiff does magnificent work on this film, but what seals the deal for me is the scene when the Viking ships travel across the North in a deep, deep fog.  And then as the sun is rising with that gorgeous morning light, we see the three ships emerge from the fog - imposing and ghost-like.  It's a truly stunning image, and it won Cardiff my MVP!


BEST LINE: 

Einar: I want this slave to live.  The sun will cross the sky a thousand times before he dies.  (turns to Eric) And you'll wish a thousand times that you were dead.  

TRIVIA:

One of the more entertaining scenes in The Vikings was the oar walking sequence - where the Vikings would run alongside the outstretched oars of the ship and try not to fall into the freezing water below.  This was a game that the real Vikings really played, and the director Fleischer commented at the time that they were filming something that hadn't been seen in a thousand years.  The stunt men practiced for weeks and even Kirk Douglas got in on the fun.  That's really him, not a stunt man, skipping across the oars in the scene.  I thought that was a fun bit of trivia.  And looks like a fun game that I wouldn't mind trying someday!

2001: A Space Odyssey

I know movie theaters are hurting these days.  Home theaters are just getting better and better, and a lot of folks are choosing to watch movies in the comfort of their home instead of going out to the movie theater where they have to deal with expensive tickets, crying babies and rude jerks talking on their cellphones.

And I get it.  I personally like the communal aspect of seeing a movie in the theater, but also do get annoyed a lot.  So why deal with other people when you can chill back on your comfortable chair, eat and drink what you want, and pause the movie whenever you need to?  And honestly, home theaters are good enough that a lot movies are going to be just as good as if you saw it in the theater.

But not every movie.  Not 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Sometimes the experience truly is different on the big screen.  Now, let me backtrack a little.  A couple of years, I wrote a review of Gravity.  I had seen the film in the theater and I was in awe of Alfonso Cuaron's filmmaking.  And as you can see in that review, I was just smacked silly by the movie.  But fast forward a few years and I watched Gravity again on TV.  And it was...fine.  I was still impressed with the filmmaking.  I still loved Sandra Bullock's fantastic performance.  But I was not in awe of the film.  The experience had changed.  It was truly a different and more powerful film in the theater.

So let's take that experience and multiply it by 50.  Because that is what happened with 2001: A Space Odyssey.  When I first saw 2001, I thought it was just okay.  I respected it and I recognized its place in film history.  But I generally reduced my feelings about the film into this sentence: "2001 is four different movies.  The monkey movie is okay, the space trip movie is intensely boring and kinda pointless, the HAL movie is pretty cool, and the last movie, the psychedelic space trip, is just weird."  Looking back now, I feel almost embarrassed with myself!

Parts of that description do still apply.  There is no overarching traditional narrative to 2001 and the film is indeed broken into those four parts.  But there is a single narrative theme.  2001 is the story of human evolution itself.  Starting with the dawn of man and then fast forwarding through time to our explorations of space, 2001 is about an ambitious a movie as you can get.  Conceived by Stanley Kubrick (The Shining) and renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 attempted to do something new.  Science fiction up to this point was basically fantasy - all UFOs, lasers and alien invasions.  Some of it was very good, some of it was very smart, but it was hardly realistic.  But Kubrick and Clarke did their homework and really tried to show what space travel would be like.  Remember that this movie was made before we landed on the moon.  And yet so much of the imagery of space travel and technology is pretty spot on, from the spinning space stations to the experience of zero gravity to artificial intelligence and even the use of ipads.  Even the handling of the alien presence is handled pretty realistically because, well, it makes no sense.  Which, to be honest, if we ever did make contact, do we really think we would understand what was going on?  It would be so foreign to us, possibly even something our minds couldn't comprehend, confusion that Kubrick captures extremely well.  In 1968, audience minds must have been blown.

But this brings me back to my experience.  My mind had not been blown.  I saw the film, respected the film and was content to not really see it again.  And then I had a chance to see it on the big screen...and my brain just exploded.  It is interesting because as I was watching it, I could still feel the length.  2001 is sslllloooowwww.  My butt was falling asleep.  I was not necessarily enjoying myself.  And then the movie ended and I turned to my friends, and said, "damn, I just went through something.  I think that just blew my mind."  And I felt invigorated because I suddenly got it.  This was a film that changed cinema forever, and I didn't just acknowledge that objectively, I could now  feel it.

Let's take that boring space journey, for example.  A ship is floating through space to the strains of beautiful classical music, slowly making its way to the space station.  This journey feels endless and when I saw it the movie at home, I fought hard to stay awake.  Sure, the ship looked neat...for the first 10 seconds.  But I had what felt like another 15 hours of watching it before we moved to the next scene.  In the theater, on the other hand I thought, geez, that looks incredible.  How did they get that shot?  And how did they get that shot?  And wait, in 1968, how the hell did they get that shot?!?   I could see the details of the model work and the special effects that mostly look as good as anything we have today (I do say mostly because there are spots that definitely don't age so well).  All in all, this was just incredibly impressive.  And I don't think audiences in 1968 were necessarily bored, because they had never seen anything like this before.  I imagine their eyes were glued to the screen the whole time.

On the big screen, I even caught little jokes I had missed before - like the instructions on how to use a toilet in space!  Of course, the joke isn't that there are instructions, but that they are so long!

I feel like I have been rambling and haven't even gotten to some of the more memorable parts of the film, such as astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) and their journey to Jupiter aboard a giant ship that is run by the computer HAL 9000.  HAL has become probably the most enduring part of the film, a character that has entered pop culture as one of cinema's great villains, and certainly one that has been imitated or parodied multiple times.  This is the part of the film that I have always enjoyed, probably because it takes advantage of an actual narrative with a true conflict, life and death situations and some really great acting and writing.

I could keep going, but I should think about wrapping this up. I'm not going to say the movie is flawless.  It is still too slow and I still can't say I necessarily enjoy stretches of it.  But it is brilliant masterpiece.  And the only way to properly watch it is in the movie theater.  Your mind will explode, and you will thank me for it!

SPOILER:

So what about that psychedelic trip at the end?  Is that still just weird or is that part better, too, now that I have seen it on the big screen?  The newly restored film is so vivid and the colors are so powerful that I was even in awe of this sequence.  And again, I found myself asking, how did they put on this light show without the benefit of computer graphics?  In 1968?!  It's crazy to me.  It does go on for a bit too long.  Once we start seeing the negative images of desert landscapes, I feel it's time to move on.  But the sequence kept me entranced up to that point.  And again, you start to notice details intercut in this light show that foreshadow the ending of the film - the birth of the star child, the next stage of human evolution.  Is this sequence symbolizing the act of conception as astronaut Dave Bowman enters the star gate?  Within the light show, there are certainly shots that resemble sperm and eggs.  I think we are literally witnessing the creation of this new being.  I had never noticed that before.  I may have even fallen asleep in that earlier viewing (this sequence does go on for awhile!).

MVP:

I don't think there can be any doubt.  You can credit Arthur C. Clarke, HAL 9000, Douglas Trumbull, and even Johann Strauss...but if there is a true MVP for a film that changed movies forever, then it has to be the man who pulled it all together: Stanley Kubrick.  I've always been a bit mixed on Kubrick.  I love some of his movies, but others leave me cold, and I've heard stories of erratic behavior or perfectionism to the point of craziness (he did make Tom Cruise walk through a door 95 times during the production of Eyes Wide Shut!).  Or while I know he wrote a lot, he also often worked with other screenwriters who did not get any credit, which really bothers me.  But there is no doubt that as a filmmaker, he was brilliant.  With 2001, he was involved in every aspect of the production.  He even won the Oscar for Best Special Effects, which weirdly is the only Oscar he ever won.  He never won for directing or writing.  No, one of the cinema's most famous directors won his only Academy Award for Special Effects, which is crazy to me.  And it is well deserved; as I mentioned, those effects still hold up today!  In any case, it is clear that Stanley Kubrick is the MVP here, the man who pulled all these pieces together into something innovative and crazy, and yes, a little dull at times, but oh so brilliant!

BEST LINE:

This one will take some context because it is also one of my favorite shots of the film.  I have another spoiler alert coming on this one!  Most of the film, when we hear HAL speaking, we see the now iconic closeup of his red eye.  But during the climactic confrontation between HAL and Dave Bowman, we also keep cutting to this other shot instead:

It was kind of an odd choice, I felt.  We have our now famous dialogue: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."  "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I cannot do that."  And the two continue to have their tense exchange, cutting between Dave in his space pod, HAL's eye and this random shot of the pod bay.  And finally Dave threatens HAL to leave the pod and enter the space ship through its emergency airlock, and HAL replies:

HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.

And then you see it.  And you understand why Kubrick has been cutting to this wide shot of the pod bay throughout the entire scene - you have been staring at Dave's red helmet the whole time and didn't even realize it.  I think that's pretty amazing filmmaking, and definitely my favorite line of the movie!

TRIVIA:

This is funny and I really hope it is true and not some amazing urban legend.  So when Samsung released their version of the tablet, they were immediately sued by Apple who claimed they were stealing their idea of the iPad.  The trial went to court.  And when it came time for Samsung's lawyers to defend themselves, they pulled out exhibit A - shots from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which clearly show the astronauts watching videos on a tablet.

So really, if anybody owns the design of the tablet, it is Warner Brothers, the studio that produced the film!  And Apple was just using a design that had already existed for decades.  In any case, Apple lost that lawsuit, and I like to think this bit of trivia had something to do with it!