Tony Curtis – trapped in a tidal pool as huge man-eating crabs approach. Ernest Borgnine – tossed into a pit of wolves with only a sword to defend himself. Kirk Douglas – grotesquely wounded in one eye by an attacking hawk. These are just a few of the violent highlights in The Vikings, a 1958 costume epic which tells the story of the savage Norsemen and their attempts to invade England.

A required rite of passage for any boy attending Saturday matinees in the fifties, The Vikings might not hold up too well today, looking more like a Monty Python skit than a serious historical drama. But you can’t say that the producers didn’t try to achieve some semblance of historic accuracy. It certainly looked like a masterpiece when I first saw it on television at age nine but that was before I saw my first true epic, SPARTACUS, also starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis.     

The exteriors of the film were shot in Norway and on the coast of Brittany, the interiors were filmed in the Geiselgasteig Studios in Munich, and the production crew built replicas of the Viking vessels (the original ships can be viewed in Oslo’s Viking Museum). The company had to hire a couple of hundred members of rowing clubs in Norway and Denmark to actually row these replicas.   

In his autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son,” Kirk Douglas recalls the filming of THE VIKINGS with some funny anecdotes about his co-stars and the production problems. Despite rumors of a legendary ego, Douglas has a very relaxed and self-deprecating prose style. ”I felt very romantic about the film, and about how everybody should work, like a team. I decided, on impulse, that we would all make a grand tour. I wanted the cast to get a feel of what these countries were like. We all assembled in London – Janet Leigh, Ernie Borgnine, Tony Curtis. I told them, “There’s a fjord in your future.” We flew to Scandinavia. Tony was terrified of flying; I think this is one of the first times that he actually flew in a plane. Instead of going directly to Norway, we stopped in Denmark, Stockholm, Oslo, and then on to Bergen, the closest city to where we would be shooting. 

 “Soon we were sending letters back home: “Greetings from Norway, where the sun shines at midnight and seldom any other time.” One beautiful, sunny day, we had gorgeous shots of the Viking ships taking off in a breeze, white sails flapping, from the deep blue Hardanger Fjord. Then the weather went bad. We weren’t sure we’d be able to match those breathtaking shots. We had to make a decision. We gave up the shots, reshot the whole thing in the rain, with the sails tightly rolled up and the oarsmen powering the boat. That proved to be the right decision, because so much of the weather was bad. I was standing one day with a group of the actors, watching a bright sunny sky turn to rain. This is very exasperating for a producer. I said to one of the Norwegian boys who was playing a part in the picture, “Does it always rain here in Norway?” He said, “I don’t know. I’m only eighteen.”

 ”…A lot of the filming and living conditions were hard. But it was fun, and we all had terrific rapport. We had a lot of help from the Norwegians. We built a Viking town…..they worked for months to prepare. They were so wonderful to us that I thought we should show our appreciation. One Sunday, I threw a party with terrific food and lots of booze. All the members of the cast pitched in and put on a show. I juggled, Tony assisting me. The audience applauded like crazy. Of course, supposedly unbeknown to us, Janet Leigh was behind us doing a striptease. The audience applauded, I bowed. “Do you want more?” They all yelled, “Yeah. More! More!” So I’d start to juggle again, and Janet would take off more clothes. They loved the show.” 

Too bad that party’s not on film!