The New Pictures

Kings Go Forth (Frank Ross-Eton Production; United Artists), the Hollywood mistreatment of a capable war novel by Joe David Brown (TIME, April 9, 1956), is one of those embarrassing pictures that say all the right things but obviously do not understand what they mean. It says that war is hell, that love is holy, that color is only skin-deep, that insincerity is the root of all evil. But it says all these things as a parrot requests a cracker, by rote and without conviction ; and instead of conviction, the picture offers a tediously sentimental farewell to arms and a rather painful exhibition of the sort of placebo liberalism that finds no difficulty in accepting racial equality--provided, of course, that the Negroes in question are well educated, successful in business, and look just like white people.

The story is set in the South of France in the midst of what Author Brown called "the champagne campaign" of 1944. His heroes, a slum-bunny lieutenant (Frank Sinatra) and a rich-kid sergeant (Tony Curtis), fight the Germans all week in the hills, fight the booze all weekend on the Riviera. Then Sinatra meets a pretty girl (Natalie Wood) and falls in love with her, even though her mother (Leora Dana), a U.S. expatriate, has informed him that the girl's father was a Negro.

Not an ordinary Negro, mind you. He was a black Horatio Alger, who started out totin' them bales and wound up president of a big insurance company. What with that and the fact that the girl looks just as white as he does, the lieutenant lets his good instincts prevail. "A lot of people," he remarks with a superior air, "need somebody to look down on."

With the sergeant it is another story. He makes love to the heroine, promises to marry her, but at the last minute casually breaks it off. "Mrs. Blair," he tells the mother without turning a hair, "I've been engaged to some girls, and not engaged to some girls, if you know what I mean. And some of them weren't the kind I'd 've taken to the country club. But with the exception of your daughter, all of them were white." The heroine tries to commit suicide; the lieutenant spends the rest of the picture trying to kill the sergeant. In the book they both succeeded, but in the picture the girl survives to exemplify the moviemakers' striking contribution to contemporary sociology--a general solution for the social and emotional problems of the mulatto. The solution: give up sex.

The Vikings (Bryna Productions; United Artists) of this picture are going to make more money in a couple of months than the vikings of history did in a couple of centuries. Anyway, that is what Kirk Douglas expects, and he can ill afford to be wrong. As producer of the picture, he spent more than $4,000,000 to rent a fiord in Norway, a castle in France and studio space in West Germany; to build a 30-acre viking village and to vegetate the countryside with 4,000 bushy-bearded extras; to reproduce a navy of 33 viking ships--a flotilla only slightly smaller than the Norwegian battle fleet; to man his foredecks with such well-known Scandinavians as Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh; and to hire, as the big name for his billboard, Actor Kirk Douglas.

Producer Douglas set aside yet another $1,000,000 to light the publicity bonfires and warn the populace that "The Vikings Are Coming!" Reviewers all over the U.S. have been showered with plastic viking ships and savage-looking letter openers in the form of a viking dagger. Seven Norwegian seamen, lured by the hope of adding another Leif to the nautical history of the Northmen, are sailing across the Atlantic in one of the ships used in the film, and the TV cameras will be waiting for them at the docks. The opening of the picture was described by Douglas advancemen as the biggest thing to hit Broadway since asphalt--a "dual premiere." As thousands cheered and celebrities glittered among searchlights, the picture opened in two major movie palaces at once.

After all the todo, the reviewers seemed a little let down to discover that The Vikings was, as the New York Times phrased it, just another "Norse opera." In fact, it is one of the bloodier bores of the season, and the only good things to be said for it are that the scenery is nice, and the book, a 1951 breastseller by Edison Marshall, was worse.

The story gets under way with a rousing rape as Ragnar the Sea King (Ernest Borgnine) slaughters the King of Northumbria and has his way with the Queen. Her son, born in secret, is shipped away to Italy, but there's a fiord in his future. Ragnar's raiders capture the child and take him back to Norway as a thrall. Nobody knows that Ragnar is the boy's father, and Eric (Tony Curtis) loathes the old brute almost as much as he hates his half brother Einar (Kirk Douglas), who is Ragnar's legitimate son and heir. One day Eric flies his hawk at Einar's face, and the beast tears out one of his eyes--a scene that is especially effective in Technicolor. In reprisal, Eric is chained in a tidal pool to be eaten alive by crabs, but he calls on Odin, and the tide goes out.

Obviously, the god has preserved him for a better fate, and she soon appears in the startling form of Morgana (Janet Leigh), a captured Welsh princess. Einar drools by the barrel, but before he can sully her honor, she has fled with Eric. "Let's not question our flesh," he tells her, "for wanting to remain flesh." Thereupon he bends the oar for a not very merry England, where after interminable bouts of slashing and bashing, swilling and swiving, everybody seems to go positively berserk with happiness--except possibly the adult members of the audience.

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