Love, Rebellion, and Cleavage

Abstract

Hammer Studios, perhaps best known for its wildly successful, low-budget horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s, released a number of revisionist presentations of the past, including She (1965), One Million Years B.C. (1967), and Prehistoric Women (1967). These alternative histories were visions of female domination: titillating, but not directly threatening, located as they were in a distant past or a “forgotten” corner of the earth. The female leadership featured in these productions was also flawed in certain key ways, be it by fatal misunderstanding of authority, transgression of human limitations, or the pursuit of “forbidden” pleasures, “forbidden” power. The Viking Queen (1967) follows in this tradition, drawing on the Romano-British past to reshape events of the Boudiccan Revolt of A.D. 61. In this retelling, however, male structures of power are problematized; the rebel queen is a model of duty and moral insight, guided by selfless love for her people and her family and deferring romantic happiness. Even so, the strength of her family ties and her sense of community responsibility, features traditionally gendered as female, inevitably doom the queen to death and (cinematic) historical failure.