The Tartars (1961) DVD

Blood will beget blood. Viking chief Oleg (Victor Mature) slays a leader of the Russian Tartars and takes a lovely Tartar maid captive. Tartar overlord Burundai (Orson Welles) retaliates, making Oleg's wife his hostage. The fuse of conflict has been lit. Bad blood between the two medieval realms will seethe and explode into all-out war. One of the most unusual of the many Italian-made spectacles to roll across American movie screens in the early 1960s is also one of the most thunderously action-filled. Versatile filmmaker Richard Thorpe, who a decade earlier guided the power and pomp of Ivanhoe and The Prisoner of Zenda, here stages eye-catching production pieces that include a libidinous night of pageantry and revelry at Burundai's court, the tumultuous sweep and clash of horse-mounted armies across the Russian steppes and the savage sword-to-axe siege of a blazing Viking fort. The pages of history turn red in The Tartars.