That jumbo gold bell gets it own stunning visual origin story, filmed by main-titles guru Maurice Binder with the same stark color tinting and silhouettes he used in the Bond film titles.
Wiry blonde Viking Rolf (Richard Widmark, really too old for this, but game) spins Bell lore while wandering around Arabia, which only gets him snared up by charismatic bell-obsessive Moorish prince Aly Mansuh (Sidney Poitier, fully committed to playing Othello in the middle of a crazy Viking movie.)
Escaping Mansuh's tower of torture, Rolf, a true movie Viking, evidently swims back to his Norway fjord......now you see why we love this movie. .With the help of his athletic young brother Orm (the still athletic Russ Tamblyn, with blonder hair than Widmark's) Rolf hijacks Viking King Harald's intended funeral ship and off they go.....back to the Middle East and right back into Aly Mansuh's captivity and a reluctant joint search for the bell.
Spectacular nonsense unfolds..... rollicking pitched battles, a riotous combo wrestling match/orgy with the Vikings and Mansuh's harem, and the movie's true showstopper.....in which Poitier threatens Widmark and his naughty Norsemen with that 'mare of steel'.......a jumbo sized curved scimitar that victims must ride like a sliding board face down on their bellies......so when you reach the bottom of the Mare of Steel, you're literally beside yourself.
Fortunately, everyone decides it's a much better idea to go in search of the great golden bell, which only leads to more rip roarin' mayhem......including a horribly gone-awry attempt to move the bell off of its mountaintop perch. ("Well, that was the easy way to get it down," cracks Widmark after the bell plummets off the cliff, taking along a whole bunch of luckless Vikings who were chained to it. Nobody worries much about the astronomic body count in this movie....)
Directed with epic humor and enthusiasm by master cameraman Jack Cardiff, you'll never see the likes of this again.......an audacious stew of adventure and tongue-in-cheek action put over by the United Nations cast of skilled Brits (Edward Judd, Colin Blakely, Gordon Jackson, Clifford Evans), and that clash-of-the-titans duo of Widmark and Poitier (one of three films in which they ate up the screen playing adversaries, along with "No Way Out" and "The Bedford Incident".....Widmark even sometimes erupts into his trademark psychotic giggle) On top of it all, you also have world champion hambone Oscar Homolka, who bellows with hysterical laughter even in the midst of battle scenes. And who can blame him......
Finally, we would never speak of "The Long Ships" without mentioning its most key player, composer Dusan Radic, whose triumphantly declarative theme music plays virtually non-stop throughout the film. The guy understood the movie better than anyone, scoring the battle scenes with music that's simultaneously exhilarating and slyly funny all at once. We dearly wish he'd gotten more big budget high profile scoring assignments other than the 1965 "Genghis Khan" (which we'll cover in our next post...)
Where else are you going to view Richard Widmark smirking in designer Viking-ware, leather hot pants, Sidney Poitier in full Shakespearian rage, as if he's searching for Desdemona to strangle, Russ Tamblyn doing Viking gymnastics while sword fighting, half naked harem girls.......and the Mare Of Steel? Mock it if you will, but the BQ holds it near to our heart......a Valhalla of a guilty pleasure....4 stars (****)....such a shame they never merchandised a toy version of the Mare Of Steel.....
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