A year or so ago, TCM ran the silent The Viking, which I very briefly mentioned before another airing many years ago. I watched it during my blogging hiatus, but didn't blog about it because I don't think it's available on DVD. I notice that it's getting another TCM airing tomorrow at 9:15 AM, so here are my several months old slightly hazy thoughs on the movie.
Donald Crisp, who would become an elder character actor once sound came, plays Leif Ericsson, but more on him later. The Vikings, as you may know, raided various coastal areas, notably in England. On one of those trips an English nobleman, Lord Alwin (LeRoy Mason) is captured. When they get back to the Norse lands, Alwin is bought by Helga (Pauline Starke), who also happens to be the nominal foster child of Leif, although she's old enough that she could be considered an independent adult, at least in the modern days. I don't know what widowed or spinster Viking women did.
In any case, since Helga is the lead woman in the movie, all the men of a marriageable bent wind up in love with her. This includes not only Leif, but also Alwin, who by now has already shown his courage and could be useful if he had been born a Viking; third, there's Egil the Black, who is the sailing master on Leif's ocean voyages. Egil is the bad guy of the piece, getting involved in a sword fight with Alwin early in the movie, and another one with Leif as part of the film's climax.
The other plotline involves Leif Ericsson and his father, Eric the Red. Eric hates Christians, and has vowed to kill any he meets. He's also got a fairly prominent place in Norse society, having discovered Greenland. Leif would like to go farther than Greenland (as you probably know from history, he wound up on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland), but needs resources for a voyage. He's about to get them from Dad... until Dad finds out that Leif has converted to Christianity! Not only is Dad going to disown him, but he's going to have to beat a hasty retreat. Not only do Egil and Alwin go on the voyage, but Helga stows away too.
If you don't know much about this movie, that probably has to do with the fact of who produced it: the Technicolor Corporation. They were constantly trying to perfect their color film processes, and in addition to licensing their cameras for use by the normal studios, they made a few films of their own in order to advertise the improvements. Becky Sharp was one, which introduced the three-strip process to feature films; there's also the short The Flag about Betsy Ross. But the company weren't movie distributors, and so had to get a studio to distribute it for them, in this case MGM, hence the MGM lion at the start. But as I understand it MGM didn't get ownership rights, which would explain why it doesn't seem to have gotten a DVD release that I can find.
As for the movie, it's a fairly silly story, but certainly entertaining enough. The color is up there with all the other two-strip Technicolor movies, which means that the print is in OK shape, but Technicolor hadn't perfected the process yet. Anything other than red or blue-green will look off. In any case, it's definitely worth at least one viewing.
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