For all but ten of The Vikings‘ 116 minutes, Kirk Douglas‘s Einar character is all macho bluster and rage and strutting around, but in one six-second passage (3:14 to 3:20) he suddenly becomes a tragic figure — a man who lets his guard down over a hint of repressed fraternal love, and then pays the price. It’s rare when a mostly villainous character is allowed to suddenly show another side, let alone effectively, at the end of Act Three, but it happened this one time. Or am I forgetting something? Charismatic bad guy, charismatic bad guy, charismatic bad guy, charismatic bad guy…oh, he’s not so bad.
