The Vikings (1958) - Richard Fleischer

A Viking boat returns from a raid. 

During a Viking raid of the English coast in the Middle Ages, the Viking leader Ragnar kills the king of Northumbria and rapes the queen. Aella, the king's ambitious brother, assumes the throne. The disposed queen later gives birth to a son, Eric, and fearing that her brother-in-law will feel threatened by the rightful heir to the throne, she sends the child away to safety. He is captured and enslaved by the Vikings. In the meantime, Ragnar has had his own legitimate son, Einar, a warrior who aspires to follow in his father's wild footsteps. The half-brothers are destined to cross paths and become embroiled in a fierce battle over Morgana, a beautiful English girl, betrothed to Aella.

This is one of the best adventure films of the 1950's, a pure delight for young boys who love history (albeit confused as presented here) and authentic action. It is spectacularly shot by the great Jack Cardiff, a master of color photography. Cardiff understood the Technicolor process better than any cameraman of his day. Exotic locations with Norwegian fiords and English castles provide a luscious setting for the film's action.

The film opens with Orson Welles' unmistakable voice, giving general background on the life of Vikings and explaining the structure of England at the time, i.e., an unorganized group of competing kingdoms. The Vikings worship a pagan god of war, Odin, and regularly conduct raids along the English coast. Simple drawings of warriors in battle appear on screen. This cuts to the first action sequence: a quick one showing Ragnar's raid.

The film jumps forward twenty years with Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine) returning from another raid. The Viking ship moves up a scenic fiord to the Viking village. It is gorgeously rugged, the narrow channel with rocky slopes rising on each side and a backdrop of snow-capped mountains in the distance. The film's epic theme plays over the scene, a mix of atmospheric French and English horns. The sail drops and the men extend long oars and begin to pull toward the dock as a high lookout alerts the villagers by blowing a gigantic horn. Purportedly an accurate reproduction of a Viking vessel, the ship certainly looks authentic with shields affixed to the side, the rowers tightly packed, and a tall dragon for a figurehead. It is a splendid scene. The water is a deep blue and the lookout's horn a perfect touch.

Borgnine as Ragnar. 

Ragnar has brought along Egbert, an Englishman and a traitor who can map the coast of England. He soon discovers the connection between the two half-brothers. The first, Einar (Kirk Douglas), makes his appearance. He's a chip off the old block, wild and full of debauchery. Besides fighting, Vikings enjoy nothing so much as guzzling ale and ravishing women, and Director Fleischer includes a couple of scenes where the Norsemen kickback for some fun. In one, they strap a girl to a large revolving wheel, her pigtails stretched out. Douglas throws axes, slicing the hair to drunken cheers.  

While hunting separately with falcons, the two half-bothers meet in the forest. Eric (Tony Curtis), annoys the Viking, and gets kicked to the ground. Provoked, he commands his bird to attack. It claws out one of Einar's eyes in a ghastly scene that looks amazingly real and dangerous, leaving blood pouring through Douglas' fingers. For the rest of the film he sports some very effective makeup, an opaque contact lens, with talon scars marring his handsome face.

Einar bears the scars of the falcon attack.

Instead of immediately killing the slave, Einar vows to make him suffer, saying: "The sun will cross the sky a thousand times before he dies, and you'll wish a thousand times that you were dead." Ragnar has other ideas though, and orders him thrown into the slop pool, expecting that either the crabs will eat him or he will drown with the rising tide. However, a storm comes up to push back the tide, causing Ragnar to take it as a sign from Odin to spare Eric's life.

With the aid of Egbert's map, Einar goes to England and kidnaps Morgana (Janet Leigh) with plans to exhort a ransom. The beautiful daughter of another English king, she is betrothed to the new king of Northumbria. But Einar is smitten with the girl. While drunk, he goes to have his way with her. Eric, also attracted to Morgana, prevents the rape, and helps the girl escape in a row boat. Alerted, the Vikings give chase, but their boat runs aground in the heavy fog and Ragnar falls overboard. He is picked up by Eric and taken prisoner to the English.

A highly entertaining aspect of the film is the pacing. Action sequences are never too far apart. The English king orders the Viking executed by dropping him into a pit of savagely hungry wolves. Ragnar asks to die like a Viking, with his sword in hand, believing that is the only way he can enter Valhalla. The king refuses, but Eric defies him by cutting Ragnar's binds and handing him a weapon. In the tradition of great scene deaths, Ragnar grins, then growls loudly at his captors and jumps into the pit, of course, without knowing Eric is his son. Here director Fleischer makes a good decision not to show the actual encounter with the animals. Instead, the camera focus on the faces of the men above the pit, looking down at the unseen action. This invokes the audience's imagination as the sounds of fierce gnashing and grunts fill the air. Eric pays dearly for his audacity. For going against his wishes, the king chops off his hand.

The film doesn't require the performers to do much; just the three men to look and act heroic, and for Janet Leigh to look lovely. They all do a fine job. Douglas likely had lots of fun on the project and gets to demonstrate his athleticism, once with a nice stunt running along extended oars, supposedly an actual tradition of returning Vikings, and later climbing up a closed draw-bridge on the handles of battle axes.

The spectacular climax.

The final battle scene is staged terrifically. The Vikings storm the English castle to avenge Ragnar and retrieve Morgana, smashing down the first barrier with a giant tree trunk on wheels. Archers fill the air with arrows and the king's men toss boulders from the battlements. Eric extracts his own revenge on Aella, then the two-half brothers meet atop a tower in a spectacular sword fight to see who wins Morgana. This is a wonderfully choreographed sequence and must have been an extraordinarily difficult shoot. Director Fleischer and cinematographer Cardiff pull it off beautifully. Fort La Latte in the Cotes-d'Armor region of France served as the actual location.

One of the great castles featured in the film, scene of the final battle.

Calder Willingham penned the screenplay, which relies on visuals and action rather than emotion. Willingham had just worked with Douglas on the excellent Paths of Glory and would later score an Oscar nomination for The Graduate. He also adapted Little Big Man.

The production design deserves a mention. The Viking village is appropriately comprised of log and mud huts, with moss and what appears to be lichen growth on the walls, and the costumes are leather and wool, just what you'd expect from the time period.

Fans of Biblical epics of the period will recognize Frank Thring as the English king, Aella. He also played Pontius Pilot in Ben-Hur and Herod in King of Kings. As Aella, he is similarly slimy and loathsome.

The film ends brilliantly with a Viking funeral. It is dusk. The body of one of the half-brothers is placed aboard a longboat and flaming arrows arc into the sky to ignite the sail. The credits roll.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) -- Alexander MacKendick

What makes New York City the most interesting metropolis in film is its dark side and Sweet Smell of Success opens up the 1950s underbelly of the place in all its fascinating ugliness. 

Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is an unscrupulous press agent who wants to get "way up high, where it's always balmy." Right now he's one of the little guys; the nameplate on his office door is cheaply printed and taped on. He's tired of being a lapdog and trolls his talents to J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), the city's most influential columnist and gossip monger. Hunsecker wields his power, making or breaking men with a few words, from small-time comics to senators. He relies on sleazebags like Falco for the only commodity that counts in his trade, information. But he's smart enough to keep his own hands clean, at one point telling Falco that his right hand hasn't seen his left hand for thirty years.

Curtis as Falco -- his greatest performance.

It's hard to say who's slimier, Hunsecker or Falco, but Falco is willing to pimp a girlfriend to get copy for a client, saying, "Come on, baby. Do it for me." Hunsecker dotes over his kid sister like a father. When he learns she is involved with a jazz musician, he engages Falco to dig up some dirt.  

"Come on, baby. Do it for me."

Falco knows all the tricks of his dirty trade. He can be charming one minute—he's described as having a half dozen faces for the ladies—conniving and demeaning the next. He will even plant drugs on the unsuspecting boyfriend.

The story plays out in the tony clubs and restaurants of Broadway and Times Square, and on the dark, crowded, wet streets of New York. It's a wonderfully shot film by famed cameraman James Wong Howe, whose gritty black and white cinematography creates a noirish atmosphere, helped immensely by Elmer Bernstein's tense jazz score—you can almost smell the cigarette smoke and garbage cans, and feel the hot sweat running down people's backs in the jostling street vendors and crowds.    

The film's most famous scene takes place at Club 21, where Hunsecker presides over the city. In turn he humiliates a U.S. senator and Falco. It's the first time the two main characters are thrown together. Their relationship, rotten and symbiotic, is the heart of the film. (Their actors' ages work perfectly for relationship: Lancaster was 43, Curtis, 32). 

Curtis and Lancaster at 21 Club - rotten to the core.

Hunsecker knows he's the dominant partner and enjoys ripping into the sycophantic Flaco. Here's a sample of some his best lines of dialog:
  
J.J. to Falco:

"I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic."

"I love this dirty town."

"You're dead, son. Get yourself buried."

Another revealing sequence occurs at Toots Shor's, a leading celebrity hot spot in New York during the 40's and 50's. Falco attempts to blackmail another columnist to incriminate the boyfriend. He fails miserably when the man rebuffs him. A chilly exchange takes place, ending when the man tells Sidney he's got the morals of a guinea pig and the scruples of a gangster. A few minutes later Falco uses those same words as if they were his own as he tries to ingratiate himself with another columnist. 

Director Alexander Mackendrick has fashioned an alluring but disgusting world of corruption. It is a fascinating look at how newspapers peddle scandal and insinuation to titillate readers. You can't help but take a peek. Unfortunately, the subject matter must have been too grim for American audiences at the time, resulting in poor box office and the curtailment of the director's career. It also failed to garner even a single Academy Award nomination. Today it is considered one of the best American films of the decade.   

Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman's script seems charged with electricity. Its great dialog is full of innuendo. A frightening example is when an old-time cop on Hunsecker's payroll threatens Falco with, "Come back here, Sidney... I wanna chastise you." Falco wisely keeps his distance—the man looks like he'd enjoy breaking a few bones. Emile Meyer plays the menacing cop. He starred in Shane four years earlier as the main antagonist. 

Tony Curtis mostly kept to costume dramas and romantic comedy his whole career. His time at the top was brief, less than ten years. He'd never remotely approach this level of performance in any other film, a perfect match of an actor to a role. It is a startling turn. When he says to his girlfriend, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do! That gives you a lot of leeway...," you know he means it. Lancaster is nearly as good as the ruthless, but lonely columnist.    

Susan Harrison as Susan Hunsecker - J. J.'s sister.

Lancaster's character is loosely based on real-life gossip columnist Walter Winchell. At the height of Winchell's fame, his newspaper column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers worldwide, and he was read by 50 million people a day from the 1920s until the early 1960s. His Sunday night radio broadcast was heard by another 20 million people from 1930 to the late 1950s. He famously said: “I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret."

The film is one of the best of the 1950's noirs. As such, you know it won't end well for Curtis and Lancaster, whose rotten character eventually knock them down a peg.

Other films shot by James Wong Howe:

• The Rose Tattoo 1955
• Picnic 1955
• Hud 1963

Another great script by Ernest Lehman:

• North by Northwest 1959

Other Films by James Wong Howe:

 •  The Rose Tattoo 1955

 •  Picnic 1955

 •  Hud 1963

Film Noir - An American Art Form

Hollywood directors unleashed a new type of film on American audiences in the 1940s, raw, realistic, and black to the core.

As American an art form as jazz, Film Noir sprung out of the national angst surrounding World War II. And like the syncopated rhythmic music developed by black and Creole musicians and first heard on the streets of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th Century, noir films blended existing artistic motifs and slapped in generous doses of improvisation and cynicism to become a new cinematic language or genre that would affect film-makers across the globe.

Its heyday was an approximate fifteen-year stretch starting in the early 1940s. The term film noir, meaning "black film," was coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 as applied to Hollywood movies of the period. Its roots can be found in American crime novels of the Depression era and German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.

Though the visual style might vary, its most consistent characteristic was stark, distinctive high-contrast lighting in black-and-white photography, laden with deep shadows and menace. Its citizens were mostly low-rungers: desperate small-time hoods, beat cops, waitresses, lonely saps and loners, and most famously, femme fatales, gals out to move up a rung or two, anyway they could. Along the way the audience is sure to get a good hard look at society's underbelly.

Sunglasses can't disguise Barbara Stanwyk's duplicitous Phyllis Dietrichson.

In Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), smitten agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), finds himself in over his head when he joins Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in a plot to kill her neglecting husband to defraud the insurance agency. Stanwyck embodied the cool, calculating femme fatale role as well as any actress. Based on James Cain's hard-boiled crime novel, it ends badly for both of them. Neff never had a chance, saying at the end, "I killed him for money--and a woman--and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the girl. Pretty isn't it?"

Noir icon and champion chump, Robert Mitchum, falls in love with the wrong woman in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), a tale of a detective unable to escape a past mistake. He has a choice, but he can't help turning his back on the good, sensible girl who loves him. Featuring Jane Greer as the twisted object of his affections, and Kirk Douglas as his gangster nemesis, the film contains characteristic voice-over dialog. Some of the best reveals the depths of Mitchum's obsession. "I went to Pablo's that night. I knew I'd go there every night until she showed up. I knew she knew it. I sat there and I drank bourbon and I shut my eyes, but I didn't think of a joint on 56th Street. I knew where I was and what I was doing. What a sucker I was."

Mitchum had bad luck with cars in noirs. When Greer's character realizes he is driving them toward a police barricade, she shoots him dead before police machine gunfire shatters the windshield. Six years later, in director Otto Preminger's Angel Face, dreamy but dangerous Jean Simmons backs him up over a cliff.

Mitchum wasn't the only sap to fall victim to an enticing beauty. Edward G. Robinson starred in two films by German-born director Fritz Lang: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlett Street (1945). In each he is mild-mannered, middle-aged, and a little dumpy. If it occurs to him that it is odd that the beautiful Joan Bennett seems attracted to him, he pushes it out of his mind--he is infatuated. Both films have the relationship leading to run-ins with Dan Duryea and murder. Duryea, a fixture in many noirs, had a sniveling demeanor and could curl his lip in a sneer with the best of them.

Edward G. Robinson can't resist the beautiful Joan Bennett.

The quintessential heist movie is The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Directed by John Houston and set in Cincinnati, it features a band of small-time crooks, more pathetic than sinister. These are just guys looking for a break in life: Doc Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), the recently paroled mastermind hoping for one last big score; Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), the muscle with a dream of owning a horse farm; Louie Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), the safe cracker whose wife and kids live in a cramped tenement; and Gus (James Whitmore), the getaway car driver who owns a greasy-spoon.

Noir crime doesn't pay and you can often expect a double-cross. The band comes up against one when, after securing the gems, their fence, dishonest attorney Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern), fails to deliver the payout as promised. Shots are fired and the band disperses to their respective fates: arrest, suicide, and death.

The Asphalt Jungle inspired numerous copy-cats, and to demonstrate its influence overseas, director Jules Dassin produced the similarly constructed Rififi, a stylish 1955 French thriller.    

Comely Marilyn Monroe was introduced to America in The Asphalt Jungle.

    
Director Henry Hathaway pushed the violence envelope to a sick level to show that something stank in post-war American society. If we had defeated Hitler and Tojo in Europe and Asia, we had still failed to eradicate corruption, poverty, and malaise in our own cities. In Kiss of Death (1947) Richard Widmark burst onto screens as Tommy Udo, one of Noir's most demented characters. In one memorable scene, he laughs maniacally as he lashes a woman to her wheelchair and sends her bouncing down a flight of stairs, first taunting her, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over. You're worse than him, tellin' me he's comin' back. Ya lyin' old hag!"

Tommy Udo helps a lady down the stairs.

Udo wasn't the only psychopath loitering in movie houses that year. Robert Wise's Born to Kill showed that depravity wasn't restricted to the low and middle class. It featured Lawrence Tierney as the appropriately named Sam Wild, a man without a conscious or morals, and whose liaison with a wealthy socialite out to grab her sister's money is no bargain for either. Claire Trevor played the woman, who one character describes as "the coldest iceberg of a woman I ever saw, and the rottenest inside. I've seen plenty, too. I wouldn't trade places with you if they sliced me into little pieces."

Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor form an unholy alliance in Born to Kill.

Ten years later we had made little progress in fixing our problems. They might be covered in a veneer of shiny new refrigerators, green suburbs, cars with power-steering (Chrysler's Hydraguide), and that most sought-after creature comfort, television; but they were alive and well.

No film shined a light under the veneer with better acuity and sharpness than Sweet Smell of Success (1958) by Alexander Mackendrick. The story plays out in the tony clubs and restaurants of Broadway and Times Square, and on the dark, crowded, and wet streets of New York. It's a wonderfully shot film by famed cameraman James Wong Howe in gritty black and white, helped immensely by Elmer Bernstein's tense jazz score--you can almost smell the cigarette smoke and garbage cans, and feel hot sweat running down people's backs in the jostling street venders and crowds. It is a fascinating look at how the media can peddle scandal and insinuation to titillate readers. You can't help but peek.

"Match me, Sidney."

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster star, Curtis as Sidney Falco, a lapdog press agent who "wants to get way up high, where it's always balmy;" and Lancaster as powerful columnist J. J. Hunsecker. Their relationship, rotten and symbiotic, is the heart of the film.

Happiness is an elusive dream in Film Noir. The genre attracted some of the best Hollywood directors and actors. Film-maker Nicholas Ray fashioned a tense drama from Dorothy Hughes' pulp novel, In a Lonely Place (1950), where the dark soul of a man in on view in all its ugliness. The requisite atmospheric lighting and shadows are here, along with melodramatic music and as flawed a protagonist as ever trod the genre. Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a paranoid writer, beset by inner demons and a wild temper. When falsely accused of murder and hounded by the police, he slowly unravels and cracks under the pressure until he risks losing the woman he loves. He sees it happening and that makes his inability to control his emotions and behavior that much more affecting. 

"I was born when she kissed me.  I died when she left me.  I lived a few weeks when she loved me."

Like most noirs, you know it won't end happily. The final scene is gripping as Steele confronts Laura Grey (Gloria Grahame) in her apartment, believing she has betrayed him. He finally goes too far and Bogart sags a broken man. You can't help but feel sorry for him. He came so close.

Noir characters often face moral conflicts. In Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) police Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) lets his penchant for excessive use-of-force box him in a corner. His victim, a low-life hood, doesn't matter, but Dixon's plan to cover up a likely manslaughter charge goes awry when his actions put an innocent man under suspicion. That he happens to be the father of the girl Dixon has fallen in love with makes matters even more difficult. Does he confess the crime, face expulsion from the police force and jail time, or keep quiet and win the girl of his dreams? The dilemma leaves the officer at a loss. His lament, "Where the devil am I? I keep coming and going," mirrored the state of confusion America sometime found itself in in dealing with societal woes in the post-war era.

Preminger had earlier cast Andrews as a policeman in Laura (1944), one of the genre's most celebrated efforts. Here, while investigating the killing of Laura (Gene Tierney), Andrews falls in love with the girl's memory, helped along by her striking painting. In a surprise twist, Laura turns up alive. It is an innocent friend who was murdered by mistake.

Dana Andrews has a strange attraction to a portrait of a dead girl.

Noir films petered out at the end of the 1950s as film-makers and American audiences grew tired of the genre. Westerns had taken over on TV, and technicolor epics were the new darlings of cinema. One of the last noirs was one of the best, Orson Welles' sordid Touch of Evil (1958), which depicted corruption in a Texas border town.

Welles played Hank Quinlan, a corpulent policeman not above planting evidence to secure a conviction. "I've never framed anyone," he says, "...unless they're guilty."

Welles infused his film with his signature camera magic: Extended takes, jarring angles, and uncomfortable close-ups. Like the genre itself, Quinlan comes to an abrupt end, floating in a pool of fetid water. It is a fine and fitting death.

In Touch of Evil Uncle Joe Grande is no match for Hank Quinlan.