'ALFRED THE GREAT'.......THE SWINGIN'EST KING OF THE 60'S.........

Alfred The Great (1969)   Until this movie came along, we thought only Hollywood studios held the monopoly of making stilted, pompous historical epics, riddled with inaccuracies and weighted down with that trademark lumbering mock-serious processional dialogue........

                   If nothing else, "Alfred The Great" proved that the Brits, our cousins from 'across the pond',  could make the same kind of clumsy, dopey and overly pretentious costume pageant that MGM and other studios use to crank out on a regular basis......

                   Given this film came out right at  the tail end of the swingin' 60's, MGM tried to a Hail Mary attempt at marketing it to the burgeoning youth crowd......"The dissenter King!" the posters claimed......and to be fair, the movie does in fact depict Alfred as one tortured, conflicted kid, whose hopes of joining the priesthood get thwarted by the demands of leading bloody battles against the invading Danish hordes.......

                   Our boy Al (David Hemmings) proves he's no peace 'n love flower child after all........put a sword in his hands and before you know it, he's hacking, stabbing and cleaving his way through stacks of Norseman led by Guthrum......(played by Michael York as a kind of bloodlusting Viking frat boy)

                    Don't expect us to weigh in on the movie's shaky grasp of the actual history being depicted here......we're in no position to judge, since we probably dozed off when they they got around to this era in history class......

                    We'll judge it only on its merits ( or lack thereof) as the sweeping action-adventure spectacular that it struggles mightily to become............

                     It's a big, sloppy mess,no getting around it. Bur swirling around in the debris, we found plenty of strange entertaining stuff and performances by the very best of Britain's acting pool.....

                      Here you'll find veteran potato-faced character actor Peter Vaughan as a wily. duplicitous neighboring King and father of Alfred's fiercely independent bride, Aelswith (Prunella Ransome).... and none other than a young, pre-knighthood Ian McKellan as a swamp bandit who becomes Alfred's ally.

                      And by all the movies Gods, let's never forget the little-known Julian Chagrin as the Danes' most lethal battler,  'Ivar The Boneless', an acrobatic wild man with rock star hair and a lunatic temperament to match.......(making the well staged battles extra juicy.....)

                    Speaking of the battle scenes, they're not bad at all, considering this movie was obviously produced on a budget way, way lower than films like 'The Vikings' or 'El Cid'. And in a stark moment of realism, the film lingers on the exhausted, gasping survivors of Arthur's army after their first hard fought victory.  We don't ever recall a scene like that in the historical blockbusters we grew up with. 

                      One thing that hit us that we didn't remember from our original viewing was the hefty amounts of rape scenes......including Arthur's brutal ravishment of Aelswith on their wedding night and extensive scenes of Guthrum's barbarians assaulting an entire convent of nuns......(we realized why this movie was never going to work for the make-love-not-war generation......

                      Other touches, however, we did admire:  Raymond Leppard's rip-roarin', symphonic score and even those visually splendid, startling bits that feature Arthur remaining in close-up while  the backgrounds behind him transition from one scene to another, signifying his conflicted poses as both a sensative soul and fierce warrior........(we remember our film school pals hating those shots,deriding them as corny, but we still get a kick out of 'em....)

                     All in all, an odd move, to make such a staunchly traditional sword-swinger in the midst of the 'new cinema' revolution taking place........even with the effort to make it more hip by having it directed by Clive Donner, fresh off his back to back sex comedies, "What's New Pussycat" and "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush'.   

                      Then again, almost any kind of movie could score a production deal in the uncertain turbulence of 60's and 70's filmmaking, but the wildly uneven 'Alfred The Great' found no favor with either young people or those who remembered the golden age of such stolid, overblown costume parades. 

                      It always looked like a movie in desperate search of its identity.......but at least for the things we liked in it, we'll knight it with 2 stars (**)  And beware Ivar The Boneless.......