Believe it or not, I've never ever seen the 50's Prince Valiant movie. For whatever reason it's never ever played TV around me, and the few times I remember seeing the VHS I never popped for it.
But reading the original Hal Foster strips recently got me in the mood and I ordered up a copy of the DVD from Amazon. I got around to viewing it several days ago. Now I watch movies on a smallish TV, and that clearly wasn't what this Cinemascope flick was meant to be seen on. In a wondeful letterbox, this looks fantastic. It's a wonderfully rich visual movie and coming fresh off the Foster originals, it's easy to see that they reallly worked to keep the look and feel of the comic strip intact on the movie.
Robert Wagner is Valiant and he looks the part well enough. Hayden Sterling is Gawain and Janet Leigh is Aleta. The acting by this trio is pretty okay most of the time, but Wagner is uneven, while Sterling is really broad. Liegh is beautiful as is Debra Paget as Ilene her sister, and they both do adequate jobs. James Mason as Brack is clearly though the best actor in this thing and he dominates the screen everytime he shows up. The only actor on par with him is Victor McLaglen as Boltar who has few scenes, but choice ones.
Aside from the indifferent acting, though the setting is magnificent and the epic scale of the storytelling really works most of the time. The sprawling battle in the Viking castle with Sligon is outrageous and captures the feel of the comic strip perfectly, with Valiant bouncing around with is creative battle techniques.
This ain't a great movie, but it's a really lavish and crisp adaptation of the comic. I'd have to say it's one of the best and most accurated adaptations of a comic I've ever seen and I've seen nearly all of them.
Highly recommended.
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It should be Sterling Hayden, rather than the reverse
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