ARIO BAVA’S recollection of how his next film got started was a bit of a jumble: “When the first Viking film with Burt Lancaster came out, they said ‘Now it’s time to make a Viking film; let’s get started. So we made Gli invasori with Giorgio Ardisson and Cameron Mitchell, on location at Lavinio, which—along with Tor Caldara—was the country of Vikings. Since I was fast and re- quired very few horses or anything else, I made the producers a lot of money.”1 Bava’s casual comments stand in need
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of correction. First of all, Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958) did not star Burt Lancaster, but rather his frequent co-star, Kirk Douglas. Secondly and most importantly, The Vikings was not the first Viking film of
this trend, though it may well have been the first to play in Italy. The trend was actually launched by Roger Corman, who directed the heroically titled The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent in the autumn of 1957 with the express purpose of taking advan- tage of the Fleischer film’s pre-publicity and beating it into theaters, which is succeeded in doing in November 1957—seven months before The Vikings’ World Premiere. Further- more, Gli invasori was not the first Italian Viking film; that distinction, as we have seen, belongs to Giacomo Gentilomo’s L’ultimo dei vichinghi (1961), also starring Mitchell and Ardisson, which Bava had actually helped to complete.
