Most reviews of this film contrast Sidney Poitier playing his role seriously with Richard Widmark's tongue-in-cheek approach and describe the plot as hokum. This it certainly is, but it's enjoyable and undemanding to watch.
The plot (in the version that I saw, which may have been edited) leaves unanswered several questions. Having dived a couple of hundred feet out of a torture chamber on the Barbary Coast (north west Africa), Widmark is next seen crawling out of the sea back home in "Scandia"; what happened in between? No-one knows the location of the bell made "out of half the gold in the world" and Poitier is desperate to find it out, but Widmark heads in the right direction; within seconds of spotting it, his longboat is shipwrecked and he and his crew captured by Poitier's men, so it can't have been that far away. Despite losing many members in shipwrecks and fights, the longboat's crew always seems to be the same size. And after many of the oars on one side of the boat splinter against a cliff face they are mysteriously replaced in the next scene.
How the Vikings turn the tables on their captors at the end is a contrived cop out that does not convince. There just aren't enough of them.
Often close to pantomime, the film descends into it when the Vikings escape into a harem and make merry with its members, with a blacked-up Lionel Jefferies as (presumably) the chief eunuch trying to defend his charges. Oskar Homolka overacts as the Norse boatbuilder, but in a film like this he may be forgiven. One can be distracted by trying to identify the British character actors in their wigs, beards and (very) short tunics. Russ Tamblyn, his dark hair dyed blond - sort of - does the occasional piece of acrobatics but is as unlikely a member of the longboat crew as Tony Curtis is in the superior film The Vikings.
One last puzzle: inevitably the Vikings end up with the bell at the end of the film but what do they do with it when they get it home (though it would have been a heck of thing to tow behind one of their boats).
The plot (in the version that I saw, which may have been edited) leaves unanswered several questions. Having dived a couple of hundred feet out of a torture chamber on the Barbary Coast (north west Africa), Widmark is next seen crawling out of the sea back home in "Scandia"; what happened in between? No-one knows the location of the bell made "out of half the gold in the world" and Poitier is desperate to find it out, but Widmark heads in the right direction; within seconds of spotting it, his longboat is shipwrecked and he and his crew captured by Poitier's men, so it can't have been that far away. Despite losing many members in shipwrecks and fights, the longboat's crew always seems to be the same size. And after many of the oars on one side of the boat splinter against a cliff face they are mysteriously replaced in the next scene.
How the Vikings turn the tables on their captors at the end is a contrived cop out that does not convince. There just aren't enough of them.
Often close to pantomime, the film descends into it when the Vikings escape into a harem and make merry with its members, with a blacked-up Lionel Jefferies as (presumably) the chief eunuch trying to defend his charges. Oskar Homolka overacts as the Norse boatbuilder, but in a film like this he may be forgiven. One can be distracted by trying to identify the British character actors in their wigs, beards and (very) short tunics. Russ Tamblyn, his dark hair dyed blond - sort of - does the occasional piece of acrobatics but is as unlikely a member of the longboat crew as Tony Curtis is in the superior film The Vikings.
One last puzzle: inevitably the Vikings end up with the bell at the end of the film but what do they do with it when they get it home (though it would have been a heck of thing to tow behind one of their boats).