Vikings don’t lack for precedent in the movies, yet the Old Norse boatmen have never quite taken hold in the collective filmgoer unconscious the same way as cowboys, pirates or mafiosi. The explanation may well be their inherent associations with paganism, cannibalism, rape and pillaging, traits understandably sanitized (if acknowledged at all) in late studio-era Viking narratives like Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings or Jack Cardiff’s The Long Ships. In 1984, Hrafn Gunnlaugsson—the supposed “bad boy” of Icelandic cinema—brought a pop-traditionalist sensibility to When The Raven Flies, which revisits Nordic mythology under the influence of spaghetti westerns, Kurosawa films and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Gunnlaugsson’s stated aim was to make “the ultimate Viking movie”, and his trilogy deserves to be far better known; they are miniature epics, and the few outside of Scandinavia who know them probably have also heard them termed as “cod westerns.
- 5/10/2022
- MUBI
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