The distinction of being the first all-Technicolor feature can't save this silent melodrama from being the tongue-in-cheek relic it now is, but of course there hasn't yet been a Viking saga made that was able to avoid the booby-trap of built-in silliness. Even so, this tempestuous (and ridiculous) Norse romance stretches credibility to the limit, boldly revising history to introduce Lucky Leif Eriksson as an early disciple of Christianity, defying his father's pagan beliefs and planting the cross of Jesus on the shores of a New World (said to be Rhode Island), where he promptly begins converting the natives to the One True Faith. Somehow the textbooks not only missed this fact, but also overlooked the passionate love quadrangle between Leif, a beautiful young Valkurie he secretly loves, a handsome young English slave, and a sinister sea captain. The novelty of color was not enough to turn audiences away from the far richer treasures of black and white film; like 3D in later decades, color was not, in the 1920s, something to be regarded seriously, and on the evidence of lively hooters like The Viking it's easy to see why.
Review of The Viking
