Mario Bava’s ERIK THE CONQUEROR – The Blu Review

Review by Roger Carpenter

Italian directors have always had a penchant for jumping on the cinematic bandwagon whenever a popular film is released.  And we aren’t talking about just a couple of directors and a couple of films, but nearly all directors and, depending upon the genre, sometimes hundreds of films.  Thus, we have the pepla of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the poliziotteschi and gialli of the 1970’s, the spaghetti westerns of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Jaws-inspired rip-offs, the Alien-inspired ripoffs, and the zombie and jungle/cannibal epics of the 1980’s. But, with the international sensation of the Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis vehicle entitled The Vikings in 1958, Italians were quick to jump on this particular bandwagon as well, resulting in a seven-year cycle of Viking films.  And Mario Bava, best known for his proto-slashers and horror vehicles, was not averse to climbing on the bandwagon occasionally himself.  During his directing tenure he directed sex comedies (4 Times that Night), pepla (Hercules in the Haunted World), poliziotesschi (Rabid Dogs), and a couple of spaghetti westerns (Roy Colt and Winchester Jack; The Road to Fort Alamo).  He also experienced success with a couple of Viking pictures, of which Erik the Conqueror is one.

Just as many Italian films cannibalized popular films—sometimes so closely they resulted in lawsuits, as in Enzo G. Castellari’s The Last Shark AKA Great White—Bava uses the basic premise from The Vikings for his first foray into Norse storytelling with only minor changes:  two Viking children are separated during the massacre of their village by the British.  One is raised as the illegitimate heir to the British throne while the other is groomed as a fierce warrior and eventual Viking monarch at the opposite end of the North Sea.  Twenty years after their separation, the two meet in a battle for supremacy over Britain and the North Sea shipping lanes.  Along the way they must navigate political intrigue, backstabbing, and forbidden love.

For those unfamiliar with Maestro Bava’s work, he was famous for wringing every drop of production value from every lira spent, though he never had much to spend.  This is true of Erik the Conqueror.  Whereas The Vikings was a big-budget film that impressed as much due to actual location filming in the fjords and vistas of Scandinavia than just the big-name actors, Bava’s film is also impressive for what he did on a no-frills budget.  Knowing he couldn’t directly compete with the scenery of The Vikings, Bava instead opted to create a cavernous underground fortress for his Vikings using sets left over from his previous Hercules film. Instead of competing with the huge vistas of the Technirama ® process used for The Vikings, Bava chose to use colorful yet eerie lighting schemes for his underground scenes.  Thus, Bava’s Vikings seem more primitive, baser, than the Vikings in the American film.  The result is some truly remarkable and atmospheric scenes studded with unreal colors and weird ceremonies.

Bava used every trick in his repertoire to create a larger-than-life story, including glass paintings, miniatures, and every trick photography shot he knew, including taping pictures from magazines to the camera lens to create castles on cliffs that didn’t actually exist.  The result is a film nearly as glorious as the $5,000,000 epic that was The Vikings.  Shot in gorgeous Technicolor, Bava, who was also famous for never wanting to leave Italy, managed to utilize the beaches of the famous WWII battle for Anzio in such a way as to produce impressive scenic shots.  When he couldn’t afford to build three actual, full-size working replicas of Viking ships like the producers of The Vikings did, what did Bava do?  He simply built a raft, decorated it with only the parts of the ship he truly needed, pulled in for a close-up, and had the crew move the camera to simulate ocean waves.  If the viewer doesn’t know the secrets to the shots, one would never know a full-size ship wasn’t built.  The overall result of his penny-pinching but innovative solutions was to create a picture that looks nearly as big as any of the 50’s and 60’s Hollywood epics.

Cameron Mitchell, himself a pretty big star in the late 50’s and early 60’s, stars as Eron, the Viking sibling saved by Queen Alice of England and raised as her own.  Mitchell is handsome and dashing, not at all like the Mitchell I grew up with in The Toolbox Murders and Terror on Tape.  Italian actor George Ardisson (Giorgio Ardisson) co-stars as Erik, the long-lost brother and natural nemesis of Eron.  Ardisson was a blue collar actor who starred in such fare as Morgan the Pirate; The Last of the Vikings; Hercules in the Haunted World; The Long Hair of Death; Zorro the Fox; and even had a supporting role in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits.  But, hands down, my two favorite titles in Ardisson’s portfolio are Clap, You’re Dead and May God Forgive You…But I Won’t.  Both Ardisson and Mitchell give solid performances in this film.  Bava also scored a couple of coups, first with the hiring of the Kessler Twins, Ellen and Alice, who were famed German singers and a popular act in Paris at the famous Lido for The Paris Follies.  They play vestal virgins Daya and Rama (diorama—look up the Greek meaning for extra credit), who engage in illicit love affairs with the two protagonists.  Bava also scored highly acclaimed Italian actor Folco Lulli for a brief scene as the doomed Viking monarch Harald.  As noted in the audio commentary, this was well beneath an actor of Lulli’s stature and he likely appeared due to his friendship with Bava, to lend his name to the film.

The film is filled with the typical melodrama of the day—political intrigue, plotting against the royalty, and illicit love affairs—which I found to be a bit tedious, but again, typical for the time.  However, there is plenty of action in the film as well, beginning with the opening massacre of the Viking village on the shores of Britain and continuing throughout the film in various locales, from ships to castles and beyond.  Again, Bava’s cinematic prowess—he wrote, shot, and directed the film—is on display as the fights are staged either in extreme close-ups to disguise the lack of scale or in distant shots to disguise the doubles used for the scenes.  But the end result is an action-packed peplum that is simply gorgeous to view.

Erik the Conqueror is an often-overlooked movie in Bava’s filmography but thanks to Arrow Video, who have also released Bava’s exceptionally hard-to-find Caltiki, the Immortal Monster as well as his equally gorgeously-designed Blood and Black Lace, we now have a nearly pristine print of this film, in both Blu-Ray and standard DVD presentation, to view. Though the film is a brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, I did note a flaw that runs through the first few minutes of the film that seems to be a scratch that simply couldn’t be repaired.  Regardless, it’s a beautiful print that deserves to be seen.  The release comes with a fine set of extras which include a new audio commentary by the always knowledgeable and interesting Bava scholar Tim Lucas, an extremely entertaining; hour-long audio interview with Cameron Mitchell by Tim Lucas from 1989; a very nice, 12-minute video essay comparing The Vikings with Bava’s film; and a short alternate ending for the film, provided from a VHS source by Tim Lucas.   The first pressing also comes with a booklet featuring new writing on the film by critic Kat Ellinger.  You can purchase the film at Amazon or directly from Arrow Video at http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/category/usa/.