Movie Monday: Kings of the Sun (1963)

If I’m back on the GHP, there must be another hokey old historical epic on Netflix! And so it seems. The film in question is 1963’s Kings of the Sun, a sword-and-sandal epic inspired … loosely … by the Mound Builder cultures of historic and prehistoric North America.

So who were the Mound Builders? The term is used to describe a wide range of Native American cultures over a long period, and strictly speaking there’s no such thing as “the” Mound Builders. What these cultures have in common is the practice of building large mounds, often for ceremonial purposes. The similarity of these platforms to the pyramids built by cultures further to the south has often been noted.

Kings of the Sun takes the position that at least one mound builder culture was the result of settlement along the Gulf coast by refugees from the overthrow of the ruling dynasty of Chichen Itza in the late 12th or early 13th century. But although I say that, it’s a pretty silly thing to say about the plot of this movie, which is only very loosely tied to the historical premise.

Anyway, George Chakiris (Bernardo from West Side Story) is the king of Chichen Itza, right, but bad old Hunac Ceel (Leo Gordon) overthrows him and he flees with his motley band of advisers, including a cranky old priest (Richard Basehart) and a bluff warrior guy (Brad Dexter). Along the way they pick up the inhabitants of a fishing village, notably the chief’s lovely daughter Ixchel (Shirley Anne Field), and sail off north, finally making their way to Texas where they meet up with a Native American tribe led by Black Eagle (Yul Brynner). Black Eagle and whatsisface (Oh, OK, he’s called Balam) compete for the love of Ixchel, they fight, they make up, the baddie attacks, they beat him, and Black Eagle dies, neatly solving the love triangle.

Kings of the Sun is a brightly-coloured, thumping-scored, completely disposable Hollywood spectacle, similar in a lot of ways to Taras Bulba and in fact directed by the same guy. It’s just a big loud pile of who cares, but it has some interesting bits in it:

• The Maya get to wherever they are by sailing across the Gulf of Mexico, but wherever they go, it seems to have saguaro. This is weird because, as we all know:

• Boy, Hollywood has never found an ethnicity it wasn’t willing to cast Yul Brynner as, huh? Even so, he wears a lot of brown paint in this one and hoo boy it’s uncomfortable.
• The usual Hollywood history rapemance plotline gets inverted here: it’s Black Eagle who gets captured and wins over one of his captors rather than the lady getting won over by the guy holding her prisoner. There is a lot of Yul Brynner’s oily body writhing around all tied up.
• It’s sort of charming how much leaping around these guys do. It’s interesting to see a period where action heroes weren’t superheroes — fit, athletic people, obviously, but not as exaggerated as they would later become.
• There’s a standard science-vs-superstition bit in the middle where our hero, being a right guy, objects to human sacrifice. He objects so hard that Richard Basehart kills himself, even. Yul Brynner talks a lot about buffaloes.
• There is a pretty good bit where they tell Yul Brynner that they’re going to execute them where he stands and accuses them all, with his face in shadow but the whole rest of his body brightly lit. It’s pretty good. Unfortunately it’s the only time that the corny, melodramatic staging of this movie really comes off.
• Speaking of Taras Bulba, it is amazing how much they want George Chakiris to be Tony Curtis. In fact, there are a lot of people in historical epics of whom this is true. I dub them: Phony Curtis.
• Anyway, it’s bright, it’s colourful, it’s bad, it’s not … as racist as it could be, I guess, maybe, but hire a Native actor to play a Native role every now and again, classic Hollywood, would it kill you?