‘The Viking’: the history-making movie shoot that claimed 27 lives
There’s no such thing as a movie production that’s 100% safe from the risk of injury or worse because sometimes accidents just have a way of making themselves happen. At the extreme end of that spectrum lives The Viking, a film that set a tragic and unwanted record that still stands almost a century on.
Co-directors George Melford and Varick Frissell had already made history when they embarked on their ambitious undertaking, utilising the latest in cinematic technology to realise their vision. Despite the title, the story wasn’t about Norsemen but instead took place on the titular ship.
Arthur Vinton’s seal hunter Jed Nelson and Charles Starrett’s Newfoundland local develop an uneasy relationship during their shared trip on board the vessel. The former encourages the latter to join him on their Arctic expedition in an effort to prevent Luke from making moves on his woman during his absence.
The Viking was the first motion picture to ever record sound and dialogue on location instead of adding them after the cameras had stopped rolling, as the filmmakers sought to create a level of authenticity and immersion the likes of which audiences had never seen. Principal photography went off largely without a hitch before reshoots made it a cautionary tale for the ages.
The finished feature had already been screened to an audience in March 1931, which convinced Frissell that The Viking needed more footage captured on the water around the Newfoundland coast to jazz things up even further. Days later, the director and his crew had joined up with an annual seal hunt, where disaster struck.
The ship became trapped in ice, but ever the opportunist, Frissell made the most of the experience by capturing shots of the Viking that he never would have been able to accomplish otherwise. After two days, it became clear that trying to manually free the boat was never going to work, and nobody was interested in hanging around and waiting for it to thaw.
Instead, a plan was hatched to use explosives to shatter the ice around the ship and free the Viking, with 25 crates of dynamite kept in storage below deck. When the charges were being prepared, one of them was accidentally ignited, and the entire boat exploded, obliterating the rear and instantly killing 27 people, including Frissell.
In a damning indictment of Hollywood’s ‘the show must go on’ mentality, the movie was released as scheduled less than three months later in June 1931. Putting sentimentality over the loss of life to one side, critics were left cold at what greeted them despite the startling volume of casualties.
Shooting a movie around dozens of crates packed full of explosives is always going to pose its own set of dangers, and to this day, no shoot has ever yielded more fatalities than the 27 who were killed on The Viking.
