Prince Valiant

Val Toupee

Prince Valiant
USA 1954 Directed by Henry Hathaway
20th Century Fox/Eureka Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers here regarding the secret identity of one of the characters... although, frankly, it really isn’t hard to figure out.

Back in 1999, I purchased a copy of the newly released FSM (Film Score Monthly) restoration CD score of Prince Valiant and it turned out to be one of my wiser decisions as far as blind buys go. It’s a gorgeous score and I’ll get back to it soon but the point is, it made me want to watch the film at some point to see how the music matched up in context. A number of years ago, the Eureka label in the UK released a new Blu Ray transfer of the movie and, of course, I snapped one up. It’s been languishing in my ‘to watch’ pile throughout the years and months but it finally floated to somewhere near the surface so... at last, I have now watched this thing.

Now Prince Valiant is based on the long running King Features syndicated newspaper strip Prince Valiant In The Days Of King Arthur (more commonly known as simply Prince Valiant), created by Hal Foster in 1937. And when I say long running I mean just that... it’s still running in newspapers in the US to this day (although obviously no longer written by its original creator, who died in 1982). My understanding is the film has taken a fair few liberties with the original material because, from what I read, when Foster returned a severely ‘red penned’ version of the script back to Fox, the studio responded in the same manner in which a lot of Hollywoodland studios have done over the years... they ignored the ‘corrections’ and just continued to do their own thing. To be fair, it had run out of its lease from another studio who had been unable to crack the script due to the severely long and unmanageable (in a pocket sized movie version) story arc and so I expect the studio was not that willing to start playing around too much once they had a halfway decent script down on the page.

And it’s kind of a fun movie, actually. It’s a bit slow moving, perhaps, for modern teenage audiences but the splendour of what was a ‘Cinemascope’ picture is all present. Actually, since composer Alfred Newman’s Cinemascope extension to the 20th Century Fox fanfare also dates to around a year of this time, I suppose this makes it one of the first pictures to benefit from the added bars.

Now, don’t get me wrong... for a swashbuckler this isn’t half the picture that, say, The Adventures Of Robin Hood was but that’s almost like comparing apples to oranges and Prince Valiant has a lot going for it. It also has a lot of silly stuff too, which I’ll get to fairly soon.

Okay, so we have both Janet Leigh and Debra Paget playing the love interest of various characters in this movie. The costumes are lovely and, it has to be said, that while Leigh’s performance is pretty good, her bosoms do threaten to steal the scenes from various actors and actresses throughout the course of the movie. But not as much as the hair piece sported by the leading actor, Robert Wagner, who plays Valiant, the viking prince trying to be accepted into the Knight’s Of The Round Table so he can lead his exiled father back to his own country to regain his rightful throne. Okay, the story just about makes sense and maybe you have to ‘be there’ watching the film to be fully appreciative of it.

After a run in with The Black Knight, where Valiant barely escapes with his life, he gets taken under the wing by Sir Gawain, played by a young but gruff Sterling Hayden and tries to help find The Black Knight who is terrorising half of King Arthur’s kingdom. Much to the dismay of Sir Brack, played here by James Mason who, as soon as he opened his mouth and started to speak, tipped me off that he was almost certainly The Black Knight that everyone was looking for. After various misunderstandings and trials, Valiant helps free his father, mother and the fair Princess Aleta (played by Leigh) from the clutches of the usurper who has taken the throne of his father’s kingdom in Scandinavia. He also has that great character actor Victor McLaglen to help him. Then, after this we get what amounts to, after all these story beats... a second, lesser climax where Valiant has to battle Brack in Camelot to prove the veracity of his own accusations against the dark knight (and luckily run him through with his broadsword so the guy can’t make a decent defence anyway, it should be noted).

And it’s a nicely done romp with some lovely location photography of England (I’ll get back to that in just a sec) and some beautifully designed shot set ups. One interior scene, for instance, has a series of wall textures and depths running across the full cinemascope screen, splitting it into three vertical sections and housing two of the characters who are facing each other in conversation, Janet Leigh and Debra Paget, in the left and middle segments. There’s nothing jarring about any of the transitions in this one either and you can tell the director and cinematographer knew just what they were doing to design the look of the various shots and their flow into the next one in such a competent and creative manner.

That being said the film is also quite camp and ridiculous a lot of the time.

Robert Wagner has said himself that he was miscast but the look of the character in the comic has a very specific hairstyle and, it has to be said, Wagner’s huge and hilarious wig is a scene stealer in its own right, even distracting from Janet Leigh’s bounteous bosoms on occasion. Apparently, he was mistaken for Jane Wyman by a visiting actor to the set one day in this wig but, to me, it’s like you’re watching a movie where the star of the show is a masculine version of Louise Brooks. This is definitely a Lulu bob Wagner is sporting and... yeah... it does take some getting used to. I guess in terms of the make up and costume tests it was a question of “toupee or not toupee?” and I guess the wig won out. That being said, it’s not the most ridiculous hairpiece in this movie, believe it or not. The ‘other’ Prince Valiant in the film has an even more enormous looking and unwieldy wig. And when I say ‘the other’ I mean... whoever the guy was who was doing the long shots of the characters when they were running around the English landscape with their backs to the camera. I figured they were using badly disguised doubles and the IMDB confirmed my suspicions that all the long shots, involving actual locations, were shot in England while the close ups and mid shots were of the main cast in the US, presumably using some dodgy back projection which I think I spotted in a few sequences. Apparently Janet Leigh’s double for these location shots was Shirley Eaton, who would go on to claim her 15 minutes of fame ten years later in the James Bond film Goldfinger (reviewed by me here).

Other things which amused me greatly is the fact that Valiant rarely walks or runs to his destination when a series of more acrobatic but less accessible routes are somehow available. Why run up a perfectly good set of steps and along a corridor, for example, when you can just jump over there, jump up there, grab a flag, swing over there and get to where you were going a few more seconds earlier but, presumably, with a lot less breath still left in your lungs. Honestly, it’s like Robert Wagner invented the sport of ‘free running’ way ahead of his time just for this movie. I can just imagine the director yelling... “Okay, Wagner, now run over there but try and find the least obvious route to arrive at your destination.” It’s like Prince Valiant’s brain is the ultimate Sat Nav, taking you miles out of you way just to travel a few seconds across to the other side of the set. Entertaining though, to be sure.

And another thing... he’s really bad in a fight. Asides from escaping, by fluke, from The Black Night and his men near the start of the picture, he rarely ever wins a fight. Every time he tries to fight someone he gets knocked unconscious. The same thing when he offers a challenge in a jousting competition. Heck, he can’t even escape more rogues in the forest without getting an arrow in his back and having to be rescued and stop off for a long recovery period in a nearby castle... it’s embarrassing. How he manages to lose any battles at all when he has such a magnificently distracting hair piece on his noggin is beyond me. If I was an opponent of his I’d be well put off from my sword skills with this big mass of hair in front of my face. Actually, now I think of it, maybe that’s why he’s so bad in a fight... because his hair keeps getting in the way of his vision. How he wins the final duel against James Mason’s Sir Brack is not something I can figure out. There must be hell toupee if he’s put off his sword stroke I guess. it’s ridiculous.

I’ll tell you what isn’t ridiculous though... Franz Waxman’s truly gorgeous, playfully Korngoldian score. There is a lot of nice stuff in this although, I have to say, I did notice it was definitely overcompensating for some pretty boring shot sequences in some places... trying to increase the speed at which they are perceived in exactly the same way that Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Magnificent Seven lifts the tempo of that film. There are loads of wonderful leitmotif melodies and there’s even something special that Waxman pulls out at the last minute for when Prince Valiant is finally united with his father’s legendary sword...

A sword that’s been talked up big throughout the movie, as it happens, which is only reserved for those worthy enough to wield it... a bit like Thor’s hammer, I guess. Except, when it’s finally brought into action at the end its... well, it’s pretty much just a sword, to be honest. Although... wait... even though it does nothing except split wood and counter Sir Brack’s blows, Waxman adds, possibly for the first time in cinema (?), an electric violin into the mix on a slow variant of Prince Valiant’s main theme to show just how special his sword is. And it’s pretty cool and sounds just a little like it should be used in a Universal monster movie rather than here but it sure is a nice touch. It’s a shame, then, that for the FSM restoration of the score, the violin layer to the music could not be located, so we are left without a stand alone version of this magical moment in the film. Still, great score from Waxman and it works really well away from the movie too.

And that’s me about done with Prince Valiant. Anyone who loves an enjoyable period swashbuckler with some robust scripting and a groovy score... not to mention an abundance of bosoms and wigs... should get a rush out of this movie. Definitely recommended for die hard and casual cinephiles alike. Although I did find it curious that Merlin didn’t show up as a character in the film but, then again, Valiant’s strong pursuit of an over zealous Christianity might have possibly clashed with the dark arts of a magician added into the mix, perhaps.