Hagbard and Signe

ABDUCTED by Joseph E. Levine, chained in a dungeon with Steve Reeves (and a cast of thousands), the epic saga has arisen. In Hagbard and Signe the cinesaga stands up, wipes off the grade-C slime, and brings to film the stature of its literary counterpart.

You may find the film's simple attitude towards its characters and their simple attitude towards each other a relief--or pitiful unrealism. Your reaction depends blatantly on the romance in your soul. Are you willing to submerge your modern psychological self-consciousness and accept that love can be that strong?

The more you enjoy Hagbard and Signe, the more it may depress you ... because way down in the depths of your romantic soul you'll know this is how men should be. These characters don't play with their own intellects for our delectation. They rarely even talk. Their spirits shine with a brilliance we've lost sight of, and they are simply beautiful, the bad ones even in their evil.

Director Gabriel Axel has stayed faithful to the saga form without being ponderous or literary. His shots and sequences flow into verses and chapters. Each segment is introduced by a lengthy, panoramic shot as the visual storyteller sets his scene.

And like the epic hero who must follow his own destiny to its fruition, Axel carries each sequence to a definite visual and dramatic conclusion. At the outset King Sigvor, who has slain their father, invites the sons of Hamund to make peace. Axel gives us separate sequences of them dressing their wounds, bathing, and drinking together, and ends with a slow pan across all the men sleeping side by side.

Content for the most part to let the story unfold before his camera, Axel also uses his editing to compound the violence that provides so much of the epic's power. The man-to-man battle scenes are uniquely agonizing (as well as bloody). Romance flows like blood on the beach of a fiord where pounding surf drowns out the horses' hoofbeats.

And the setting is a film in itself. Shot in grainy-greenish color, to a soundtrack of dirgeful medieval music, the Icelandic countryside (sheets of solid lava, mist rising from craggy fields) seems like another planet. Maybe it is--but then the whole picture harks back to an idea of man light-years away from our own.