I was 8 years old when THE VIKINGS came out. It was my STAR WARS.
I was 9 and felt the same. I remember excitedly watching Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh (and Kirk Douglas too, I think) being interviewed on TV during the making of it. And I treasured my copy of the Dell Movie comic. Definitely the movie event of 1958. I've watched my Blu-ray repeatedly and the picture remains a knockout. Recently a friend told me he and his 12 year old daughter had just discovered an amazing old film on TV and loved it. Yep, it was "The Vikings", still accumulating new fans after all these years.
Gotcha. I actually wish that the most highly esteemed directors had branched out even more. I would love to have seen an actual honest-to-goodness supernatural horror film directed by Billy Wilder, for example.
Sunset Boulevard doesn't count? It's narrated by a corpse, and Gloria Swanson is pretty scary.
I was 9 and felt the same. I remember excitedly watching Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh (and Kirk Douglas too, I think) being interviewed on TV during the making of it. And I treasured my copy of the Dell Movie comic. Definitely the movie event of 1958. I've watched my Blu-ray repeatedly and the picture remains a knockout. Recently a friend told me he and his 12 year old daughter had just discovered an amazing old film on TV and loved it. Yep, it was "The Vikings", still accumulating new fans after all these years.
And the Aurora Viking Ship Model, followed by the Aurora Viking model that looked (sorta) like Kirk Douglas.
My earliest experience with a Fleischer film was with me having no idea of who he was before or even after seeing the film. This is in the early '60s: My mom liked shopping in the downtown department stores in Washington D.C. She didn't drive so getting there involved several different busses and transfers. My treat for going along this particular time was a afternoon showing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at one of the fancy downtown theaters. We got there and noticed it was double billed with something called The Vikings. Must be another kids film, right? Well, it was the first film being shown when we got there and by the time it was over I thought it was the greatest film my young eyes had ever seen. My immediate request was "Can we watch it again?" Somehow my mom said ok and that Disney film took forever to finish before I could watch that neat film with the loppings and the bird attacks, etc. My mom became a saint in my eyes that afternoon for indulging me in seeing a film (twice) that I'm sure she didn't want to watch once. To this day this is still one of my treasured theater experiences and for sure the oddest double bill I ever attended.
I only ever saw The Vikings on TV, but seeing the final reissue of Zulu, a TT title, on the big screen at my long demolished local theatre with one of my sisters and one of my brothers was my equivalent. We arrived after the movie started (about 15 minutes in, when the remnants of Durnford's Horse arrive and depart) and stayed over to see what we'd missed - those were the days of "This is where I came in" - but loved the picture so much we stayed over and watched it all over again. That was one of my very first movies (I think I'd only seen Bambi, Dumbo - with the Winnie the Pooh shorts in support - and Paint Your Wagon on the big screen before, all in single screen theaters that are long gone), and from that moment I was hooked. It even got me into film score collecting - Zulu and Goldfinger were the first two film soundtracks I ever bought (on LP and cassette respectively). Like The Vikings it still holds up to this day.
Back to The Vikings, an extract from my interview with Fleischer when he talked about the film:
Quote:
During shooting (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Fleischer had discovered the secret to directing Kirk Douglas - always keep him in the centre of the frame at the beginning of every shot - something which did not go unappreciated when the star chose him to direct The Vikings.
“Kirk and I got along exceedingly well on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but on that picture Walt Disney was the producer and Kirk was the actor and I was the director. It was just as clean cut as that. But (on The Vikings) he was the boss: he was not only the producer but he owned the company that was making the picture, Bryna Productions, and he had a lot of money, his own money, riding on the film. This was, if anything, a much more complex production than the 20,000 Leagues, which was bad enough technically, but this was logistically a more difficult film. And it had a whole style, a whole technique.
“I must say that Kirk was a very, very good producer, and his main concern was quality, and he didn’t cut any corners and he let me do what I wanted to do and he had left me alone while I was preparing the picture. But the pressure and the responsibilities made him very nervous, so we didn’t get along quite as well on The Vikings. It became a bit adversarial and so we had our shouting matches and arguments.”
Then there were the weather problems in the Norwegian fjord locations.
“We had about ten days of good weather right at the beginning before the actors showed to start their thing. I spent ten days in beautiful weather shooting scenic things, luckily. And then the actors came on and the weather deteriorated, as did my relationship with Kirk. However, the bad gloomy overcast weather added a lot to the strength of the picture, the look of it. The mood of the picture was enhanced by that, but it was hard work. Very cold, rained all the time and lots of fog. It was tough.
“It meant, naturally, we were falling behind schedule. Kirk was getting nervous about that. The picture was being made for United Artists as well as his own company. United Artists got very nervous, they flew in to see what was holding up the production, why we were so slow, and that put more pressure on Kirk.
“Also the script was constantly being rewritten while we were working (during the filming of Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick had convinced Douglas that the original script was too poetic for the cast), and sometimes he would get pages that I didn’t get, and we’d get on the set and we’d have two different scripts going and he’d accuse me of being confused about the story and I’d say, ‘It’s hard not to be confused if you get pages of dialogue that I don’t have.’ That would turn out into a shouting match. Anyhow, it was not too pleasant a picture to make. But he was very uptight about everything because of these various pressures and I can understand that. You try to understand it, you try to forgive it, but it’s tough to live with though!
“Kirk in general is not an easy guy to work with because he’s so concerned about getting the best out of everybody, including himself. That’s a wonderful attribute to have, it’s a wonderful thing, but you can carry it too far and you get off into a realm of arguing about things that really don’t matter. Like doing a scene with his arms crossed one way and then at the end of it he would say, ‘Do you think it would be better if my arms were like that?’ crossed the opposite way.
“And I’d say, ‘Kirk, it doesn’t make any difference.’
“‘Well, it’s got to make a difference! One has to better than the other.’
“‘It doesn’t have to be better than the other!’
“‘Well, one has to be.’ And we’d get into a terrible argument about a ridiculous thing. But that’s the way he is.”
While The Vikings proved hugely successful, Fleischer remains convinced that had they retained the original script the end result would have been considerably better.
Here's hoping that TT will bounce back and be able to give us one of Fleischer's most overlooked epics, Barabbas.
A few years ago, I started a thread in the Movies sub-forum asking people which four directors they would memorialize on a “Movie Director Mount Rushmore.”
I would have to look my own up again, but I’m pretty sure that I listed Fritz Lang, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Akira Kurosawa.
I think I'd definitely have Sidney Lumet among my four. To help bring this thread back to TT, I have one of his titles in a TT edition: Equus. That film is a superb example of successfully "opening up" a stage play for the screen. The play Equus is very much a highly stylized work created for live theater performance that works best with minimalist production design. Writer Peter Shaffer and director Lumet totally transformed the work into a successful cinematic one. Different modes of transportation, but the destination is the same and the journeys equally impressive and profound. (Contrast this with something like The Fantasticks, which also tried opening up for the screen but--in my opinion--failed miserably, totally losing the magic and charm of the theatrical work; I think part of the problem may have been some poor choices in casting, but overall it seems to have been a misbegotten production...)
I haven't seen any reviews for it online, but I picked up TT's release of The Big Fix this week and I'm very happy with the picture and sound quality.
This neo noir private eye film only got a VHS release in the 80's and would have been largely forgotten if not for occasional airings on Starz' Sleuth channel and Turner Classic Movies.
It would have been nice to get some better extras like a commentary track (director Jeremy Kagan and screenwriter Roger Simon are still with us) beyond the isolated score track (you can tell Bill Conti is really struggling to keep his disco influences under control), but given TT's financial situation, that may not have been possible.
Either way, as a big fan of the neo noir private eye films of the 60's and 70's (Newman's Harper and The Drowning Pool, Sinatra's Tony Rome and Lady in Cement, Garner's Marlowe) it's nice to finally have this underrated detective film on HD physical media.
EDIT: Before anyone mentions them, I'm not really a fan of private eye "deconstructions" like Altman's The Long Goodbye. Very self-indulgent and contemptous of my favorite genre of film.
I miss the IMDb forums as well and I haven't found anything quite like it since. There's little reason to go to that site anymore since Wikipedia seems to offer more interesting production information than they do, other than technical stuff like OAR and a full list of crew.
Probably the thing I miss the most were reading about other people's interpretations when it came to ambiguous endings.
Much of the content of the old IMDB boards has been directly transferred to the MovieChat site. I've gone there and found complete discussions I'd participated in YEARS ago on the old IMDB boards; things I'd forgotten I'd even written.
Now I don't know how much traffic that site gets, but I'd encourage everyone to go there whenever you all get the urge to make a comment or two about a film; can't hurt to try and get the traffic up.... https://moviechat.org/
Devil in a Blue Dress is a tightly constructed neo noir with some delicious supporting characters and also a very casually relaxed movie star performance from Denzel Washington. The texture that you would expect from a noir with an African American lead character is also worked in very organically and the ending is a nice little stinger.
I saw it via Sony’s region free german blu ray which has the same master as the TT release. It is a decent if unspectacular older remaster but I can’t see it getting a new restoration anytime soon.
EDIT: Before anyone mentions them, I'm not really a fan of private eye "deconstructions" like Altman's The Long Goodbye. Very self-indulgent and contemptous of my favorite genre of film.
Altman's The Long Goodbye may have been self-indulgent (you could say that about most of his films), but I don't think it was contemptuous at all. He took Raymond Chandler's story and re-imagined it in a 1970s context, much the way that Phillip Kaufman re-imagined Invasion of the Body Snatchers in a psychological context. Gould's Marlowe is a different kind of cat than Bogart's Marlowe, but Chandler himself was going for different things than he was in The Big Sleep. The plot meanders, with false starts and dead ends. The character of Roger Wade was basically a stand-in for Chandler himself, and Chandler's ending is even more nebulous than Altman's.
I think Altman's version shows respect for the genre by giving it a new interpretation and not just trotting out a by-the-numbers reenactment.
My earliest experience with a Fleischer film was with me having no idea of who he was before or even after seeing the film. This is in the early '60s: My mom liked shopping in the downtown department stores in Washington D.C. She didn't drive so getting there involved several different busses and transfers. My treat for going along this particular time was a afternoon showing of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at one of the fancy downtown theaters. We got there and noticed it was double billed with something called The Vikings. Must be another kids film, right? Well, it was the first film being shown when we got there and by the time it was over I thought it was the greatest film my young eyes had ever seen. My immediate request was "Can we watch it again?" Somehow my mom said ok and that Disney film took forever to finish before I could watch that neat film with the loppings and the bird attacks, etc. My mom became a saint in my eyes that afternoon for indulging me in seeing a film (twice) that I'm sure she didn't want to watch once. To this day this is still one of my treasured theater experiences and for sure the oddest double bill I ever attended.
great story I just saw it for the first time about a month ago and thought it was a blast.
I hate to be "that guy" (too late!), but is there any rumor of an upcoming sale? Thanks.
Nothing has been announced as of yet. The last sale finished up around Halloween. Though looking back through their Facebook page I do see they had an "End of the year" sale on Nov 19th of last year. It lasted through January. Would be great to see another sale like that if possible
Hey- it's my first post in a long time! Great to be here again! Re: TT, I'd love it if they brought back Lost Horizon and Lenny! Anyone here anything about that happening in the near future? I was able to buy Sexy Beast when it came out and that's my only TT disc so far. Although I think I'll grab Rollerball.
Hey- it's my first post in a long time! Great to be here again! Re: TT, I'd love it if they brought back Lost Horizon and Lenny! Anyone here anything about that happening in the near future? I was able to buy Sexy Beast when it came out and that's my only TT disc so far. Although I think I'll grab Rollerball.
Re: TT, I'd love it if they brought back Lost Horizon and Lenny! Anyone here anything about that happening in the near future?
It won't happen at all. After they did their eighth reissue (The Train), they announced that they wouldn't be doing any more of them. You'll just have to hope that other labels decide to pick them up, but they took long enough to sell the 3000 copies that TT did, that I don't imagine anyone else would be too excited to pick them up.
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I just saw it for the first time about a month ago and thought it was a blast.
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