Wonderful Movie

Sadly Over-hyped

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This movie is kind of long, just over 2 hours, but there is a lot of action and twists in the poor life of a slave named Anna Hale. She was sent to America as a bond servant instead of hanged in Britain. Sold to one owner, she ends up in the clutches of another evil character who provides arms to the Indians and stirs them up to turn against the colonists. She is in and out of scraps for the entire movie.There is only one beef I had. When Gary Cooper crawls out the a river all of a sudden he had a gun, with dry powder at that. This is the only mistake I could see in and otherwise good picture. As I said, there's a lot of action.

Unconquered (1947) is a miracle of bad filmmaking. This is Cecil B. DeMille overindulging himself for two and a half hours, offering us a healthy heaping of camp, costumes, sexual titillation, and over the top action.Where does one even begin? The characters are all idiots who wander from scene to scene, somehow surviving an onslaught of ridiculous events ranging from plunging from a waterfall to surviving an attack courtesy of offensive Native American stereotypes. Poor Paulette Goddard finds herself spending 75 percent of the movie trussed up, leered at, threatened with phallic objects, and in her undergarments, usually several of those things at once. I'm surprised the Code was okay with such sadomasochistic elements in the picture, but maybe they just laughed it off because it was so silly.The cast is made up of a talented bunch, but their performances are largely uneven. Gary Cooper, Paulette Goddard, and Boris Karloff seem embarrassed to be there and alternate between being wooden and cartoon-y. Only Howard Da Silva as the lecherous villain comes off with his dignity intact, knowing that when you're in schlock, you have to go gloriously all out with the camp.The whole look of the film is studio-bound and garish, so it's not visually appealing either. If you are a connoisseur of kitsch or have a group of like-minded friends, then this turkey is a fun one.

It's 1763 in and around Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania. Gary Cooper is an amiable captain in His Majesty's First Own Monongahela Fusiliers or something. Trouble is brewing with the Indians, called "savages." The savages speak a made-up language, unless "iksa" is a prominent part of their Algonquian dialect. When they speak English, they say: "You burn white woman at stake." Paulette Goddard is a slave whose ownership is in question -- a tug of war between the honorable Cooper and the villainous Henry da Silva. The legitimate owner, of course, is Cooper, who soon takes to romancing his slave. "The moonlight has turned your dress into emeralds." And "The starlight is dancing in your eyes." Now, lines like this don't come easily to Gary Cooper, nor does his dress uniform. Comfortable in fringed leather, he has to wear this garish outfit to the governor's ball. An absurd three-cornered hat. A bright blue jacket with scarlet facings and bright brass buttons. But BOOTS -- no white stockings for Gary Cooper. Real men don't wear white stockings. It's just one step away from fishnet and garter belts. All together, he carries on like a man with long, jointed sticks instead of limbs, but always honorable. Cooper bamboozles a tribe of savages about to burn Goddard alive by playing tricks with a compass. The Indian chief, Boris Karloff, is stupefied by the unerring arrow of the compass. It's a scene out of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." Karloff's character -- Guyasuta - Chief of the Senecas -- was a real historical figure, an early pal of, and guide for, George Washington. Paulette Goddard is an attractive women, even though she is no longer the sprightly nymph with the pretty legs from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." And she's superb as a slave whose dress may be torn to shreds, who may be rough-housed by the villainous, cheating, thieving, lying, murdering, rapist Howard da Silva, dunked in a rapidly flowing river, and tortured by Indians, and who must scrub floors in a filthy tavern, but who never loses a false eyelash or is without lipstick and rouge. She was never a bravura actress but evidently a nice woman. When she died, she left most of her estate to New York University.Those taverns, by the way, look convincing as all get out, like the other interiors. Production design and set dressing don't usually get their due but they should because they add so much texture to the images. That tavern is stuffed full of sacks of grain, hewn tables, simple rickety chairs, piles of corn, long rifles hung on racks, trenchers, pewter tankards and unidentifiable bits of feathered artifacts. The direction is by Cecil B. De Mille so don't expect nuance in the acting. When a woman is frightened, she doesn't just scream. She puts her clenched fists against her cheeks, pops her eyeballs, and shrieks in horror -- if she doesn't faint outright.The movie has its merits. It's as colorful as a peacock's tail. The interplay between the characters is old fashioned but classic. We get to see George Washington when he was a mere colonel. And there is a genuinely exciting scene in which Cooper and Goddard escape from the pursuing Indians in a canoe. Their canoe plunges over a waterfall the size of Niagara and their escape is a miracle. At the end, Fort Pitt is besieged by whooping savages, scaling the palisades using canoes as ladders. The white defenders shoot them down by the hundreds, but savages are as many as needle on pine tree, mosquito in swamp, fish in Lake Erie, flea on hound dog, snake on head of Medusa, pigeon on statue, dollar in Trump wallet, fly on picnic table, illegal at border, gun in NRA closet.The climax involves a shoot out between two enemies. "I know you can draw faster than me," says one of them, drawing a line quickly from a thousand and one scenes in cheap Westerns. Well, Fort Pitt is under siege and hopelessly outnumbered. And the outcome? The cavalry arrives and saves the day. Salutem ex mortuis.

Cecil B. DeMille had been doing a series of films about American History from 1937 (THE PLAINSMAN) to 1940 (THE NORTHWEST MOUNTED POLICE - although actually it was a film regarding Canadian history instead). His two film in World War II were THE STORY OF DR. WASSELL, which is a war picture set in the far east - but dealing with an American war hero, and REAP THE WILD WIND (set in the Caribbean, but dealing with pirates attacking our merchant marine in the 1840s). UNCONQUERED dealt with a period that he had not covered - the pre American Revolutionary period. It would turn out to be his last historic film about America (unless one looks at THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH as a view of part of our theatrical and cultural history in 1950). His choice was curious - he might have done a film on the fall of Quebec and deaths of Generals Wolfe and Montcalm, or a film on the American Revolution. Instead he chose events in 1763, just as the split between England and the colonies began to develop. But the events deal with the situation that led to what is called the "Conspiracy of Pontiac", where an intelligent Indian chief united many of the tribes in the Ohio Valley to revolt against American settlers and British troops, to preserve it for the Indians. The result was that many settlers and Indians were killed before the fighting ended, and Pontiac was killed. That is the story, but most is jettisoned for a fictional account of events in the Ohio Valley. The villain is Howard De Silva, intent on keeping out the colonists by arming the Indians, so that he could have a monopoly of the fur trade. He is also responsible for illegally bringing Paulette Goddard into the colony of Virginia as an indentured servant. Gary Cooper is the man opposing De Silva in his plans regarding the Indians and his plans regarding Goddard. The film is not DeMille's best, but it's Technicolor, De Silva's performance, the appearance of Boris Karloff as a villainous Indian (he would play an Indian again a few years later in TAP ROOTS), and the two leads make it entertaining enough. But my interest in it deals with two supporting roles. Porter Hall is Mr. Leech, who is bribed (although he is aware it is a hanging offense) to send the pardoned Goddard to the colonies as an indentured servant. He's not in much of the film, but it is a nice performance. But better is Mike Mazurki. The ex-wrestler was not an actor but occasionally turned in first rate performances such as his love-struck thug in MURDER MY SWEET, and Joan Blondell's boy-friend (and moral superior to Tyrone Power) in NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Here he is a minor villain - a thug for De Silva. For most of the film he is doing De Silva's dirty work without a thought. But at the film's conclusion he is faced with a moment of truth. De Silva, Cooper, Goddard, and Mazurki are trapped in a cabin, but have weapons to protect themselves. Cooper knows that troops will be arriving soon to rescue them. But De Silva is deluded into thinking he (and Mazurki) are safe because they have been arming the Indians - he's ignoring that as a white, Englishman/colonial he's as hated as the others. He tells Mazurki to open the door and signal the Indians to let them go. Mazurki, showing a commendable intelligence, refuses. De Silva orders him again, and then he decides to do it himself. He opens the door and an arrow hits him in the center of the chest. Mazurki gets up and closes the door from the back. He then tells Cooper they'll all wait until the troops arrive. The film soon ends, but to me that moment was one to treasure. Rarely has a subordinate have such a satisfactory way of being proved correct over his boss.