Alfred the Great

This movie is dire. It paints England in the squalid colours of cliché and melodrama, where there should be character and drama. The script is mainly at blame here, with its stagy monologues and all-too-often speeches. But, "once more unto the breach" this is not. It is wooden and bereft of any real sense of emotion or motivation for the characters. As a result we are dragged through the major events of Alfred's life without any real notion of what made the man tick. What we have instead is a real Bastard - a man who is arrogant and tyrannical, self opinionated and full of self loathing. So you wonder if you care at all.

David Hemmings is as wooden as the script itself and poor Michael York suffers so much from being a stereotype that he might as well be a cartoon character. Nothing works here. It's long, it's boring, and Hemmings ranting in yet another tirade of opinion does nothing but annoy.

The battle scenes are awful - and I don't mean in the light of today's battle scenes. I mean these are terribly choreographed jumbles which, even when they are trying to be clever with military formations, just look like a load of soccer hooligans going at each other in a field. It's wholly uninspiring stuff! Bare in mind that Spartacus was 1960 and The 300 Spartans (which the film alludes to) was 1961, El Cid 1963, the list goes on... and while this film is an English and not Sword'n'Sandal Epic I see no reason why it could not at least aspire to set pieces such as feature in The Vikings (1958).

The Danes wander around chanting in formation and the chanting is nothing short of infuriating because it goes on and on and on throughout the entire picture. Also the depiction of these pagans is nothing short of ignorant. Yes, certain Gods are mentioned, but any understanding of how these people really thought of them and worshipped them is sold down the river for yet more clichés of the "evil-pagan" vs the "good-christian" - utter rubbish! There are no "real" scenes of Danes at all, and it is films like this that merely fuel ignorance, not dispel it. It all stinks of really bad direction and ill-thought out production.

The colour is drab and lifeless, and life is depicted as not much short of squalid, which we know it wasn't. I kept expecting the Monty Python team to pop up, "there's some lovely mud down 'ere" (a lá The Holy Grail). The costume department do seem to have been more on the ball, but the dull colours only amplify the banal palate of the picture, with it's uninspired wallpaper score and it's pseudo-theatrical pretensions. Even the photography and the editing are dull.

Only Ian McKellen appears to come out of this picture without egg on his face - and that's because he looks wholly uncomfortable in the film, probably wondering what the hell he's doing in this tripe.

And the "Gutts-Ache" of my title is a favoured saying of Alfred in the film awe inspiring script - "you make my guts ache"!!! Dross...

Confession; I have not seen the movie, but I do have some interesting facts to share about the making of the movie: Many of the battle scenes were filmed in Ireland using Irish army regulars as extras. The men learned the marching chants and what you hear in the movie is at least in part the actual chants of the extras.

Some of the men earned extra money by doing some of the riskier shots (guys carrying kicking and screaming women for example; my Father was one such extra and earned his extra money by lying on the battlefield and permitting a horse to walk up to his 'body' and then circle around his head; some extras were unwilling to risk being stepped on, but my father's familiarity with horses convinced him that the horse would avoid stepping on a person).

The Viking ships were motorized with oarsmen acting to produce the realistic effects. One boat was offered to the local boy scouts at the end of filming, but was scooped up by a buyer before the deal was closed.

After days of shooting with large numbers of extras on the shores of the River Shannon near Athlone, the crew would repaint the brown grass using large buckets of green paint.

Although not a review, I hope this information is of interest to the site visitors, it comes from the recollections of my Father. Cheers!

When I saw this film for the first time back when it was released, I was vastly disappointed. I wanted better dialogue, better costumes, and above all more fidelity to actual history. Some of the big plot engines, especially the one involving Michael York's and Prunella Ransome's characters, never happened in reality, and I have this stickler historical mentality that feels if you make a historical movie about real people, it should be, you know, accurate.

I was a critic at the time, and as I recall, I gave it a fairly scathing review. But upon subsequent catch-as-catch-can late-night viewings (and why why WHY isn't this out on video and DVD?), I have come to temper my opinion. Michael York especially is outstanding---when he's onscreen you can't take your eyes off him, though I very much doubt the real-life Guthrum the Dane looked anywhere near so cute---and I so wish that Clive Donner and the writers had given his rather swoonalicious Guthrum---the Beatle Viking!---a whole lot more to do.

(It's not in the movie, but in historical fact Alfred and Guthrum made a peace treaty afterwards that split England between them, Alf taking the south and west and Guthrum taking the north and east. So really Alfred bargained for his peace, and if it's Alfred the Great, it should darn well be Guthrum the Great as well...)

David Hemmings's performance is as good as can be expected, given some of the thankless dialogue, and he is both tortured and twinkly; while Prunella Ransome's Queen Aelhswith is not only decorative but intriguingly liberated for a noble ninth-century lady (however historically inaccurate and ultimately unconvincing).

And the supporting cast is nothing short of tremendous: Ian McKellen (and you can see Gandalf the Grey in his eyes...), Colin Blakely, Vivian Merchant (who reportedly insisted on playing her character as a mute after a dialogue rewrite was not forthcoming), Julian Glover, Peter Vaughan, Sinead Cusack in her film debut.

Pity the script didn't give any of them but McKellen anything to really get into, though Vaughan munches a bit of scenery. If they'd had something better to work with, "Alfred the Great" might have been the Anglo-Saxon "Lawrence of Arabia"...

"Alfred the great" is an entertaining film with perhaps too much battle scenes.The two leads are convincing but the part of the queen is too underwritten.

The first scenes between David Hemmings and Prunella Ransome are good though: an educated prince who knows the Bible by heart and whose only ambition is to become a monk;an ignorant virgin under her father's thumb who uses her for political reasons.

Then comes Michael York ,the villain who's got twenty concubines and who falls for his enemy's wife .

This is the story of a reluctant king who believed in peace and love and finally discovers that in those troubled times (the 9th century) you had to be cruel to be kind .

Like this?try these...

Richard Fleischer: the Vikings 1958

Jack Cardiff:The long ships 1964

Like me numerous people commenting on this film have done so from memory and have not seen the film since its original release in 1969. This must be indeed be testimony to its lasting appeal for, strangely, it would appear that this film has not been released on DVD/Blu-ray. I will not discuss the historical content which seems to have met with rather mixed reviews (failing memories?) but I shall concentrate instead on the off-screen relationship of the principal protagonists played by David Hemmings and Prunella Ransome. Hemmings was, by his own admission, a 'Jack the Lad' who when asked to kiss Ransome in rehearsal did so in a manner that can only be described as being in the French style. Ransome was so furious that she refused to speak to him offset and in fact there was no communication between them again for nearly thirty years. Hemmings eventually apologised at a function they were attending and it was their final meeting for they were both dead within 4 years. The cause of Ransome's death has never been made public.