Cinema: A Thing of Booty

The Long Ships, a riotous viking sea saga, has impossible acting, a preposterous script, some eminently seeworthy ship reconstructions, and more enjoyable bloody foolishness than many an epic costing three times as much.

Oscar Homolka sets the tone as the crusty old Thane of Skandia, a bankrupt shipbuilder with a voice like a rockslide. Searching for the legendary Golden Bell, a thing of booty "as tall as three men, and cast by the monks of Byzantium," Homolka's sons Richard Widmark and Russ Tamblyn steal the Norse King's funeral ship as well as his shapely daughter (Yugoslavia's Beba Loncar), and head south. All that stands in their way is a mutinous crew, a maelstrom and Sidney Pokier, a Moorish prince. He, too, dreams of the golden "Mother of Voices," but hears only the wail of his neglected Queen Rosanna Schiaffino. Pokier captures the vikings in a highly photogenic battle beside their shipwrecked hull.

From then on, the weapons chosen range from flotsam and jetsam to pure slapstick. Director Jack Cardiff is at his most ingenious in a triumphal march that turns out to be an ambush—long avenues of Moorish troops stand at rigid attention, each with a quick viking blade at his back. In the subsequent melee, even the lovely Schiaffino is impaled on a lance the size of a mizzenmast. Though such wounds are invariably mortal, they never seem the least bit serious. And that is probably what keeps Ships from going under.