THE UNCONQUERED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 473, 16 July 1948, Page 29

THE UNCONQUERED

(Paramount) \HO ate The Unconquered? Those who see out the film (the whole stamping 13,000 feet of it) and come safe home are not likely to have any doubts about their own right to the title, but since Cecil B. DeMille has obviously expended a generous amount of toil and sweat in the production of this glorious but blood-stained page of Frontier History he has a right to be heard too. "On the Anvil of History," booms Mr. DeMille, in a clangorous foreword to his latest epic, "Men forge or break their chains." Those who break them are The Unconquered. They are the strong men (and beautiful women) who live at the End of the Present and the Beginning of the Future, who have gunpowder in their veins and the image of uncrossed mountains permanently stencilled on their retinas. They are the elect who know how to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield (especially the women). Constantly in perils of waters, in perils by heathen, in perils in the wilderness and (not least) among false brethren; it is not surprising that occasionally they get drowned, scalped by Injuns, shot, burned or betrayed before they have got much more than a step beyond the Threshold of the Future, but in such cases Mr. DeMille leaves us in no doubt-their souls go marching on. More particularly, The Unconquered are Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard. When the picture opens neither has got so far as the beginning of the Future, but Miss Goddard seems to be getting perilously close to the End of the Present. To be precise about it, she is on the point of being sentenced to death by Mr. Justice Aubrey Smith, terrible in scarlet and ermine, for her part in the murder of a pressgang bravo (she is Innocent, of course,’ she was only helping her brother to escape), The black cap. has» no* sooner’ descended, however, than she is offered the King’s clemency, which takés the form of an optional sentence-Slavery or the Gallows, death by hanging or 14 years as a bond-slave ("To be bought or sold") amid the unknown hazards of the King’s American colonies, I was sorry that this stirring scene occurred so early in the picture, and before one had properly grasped its significance, because in a way it was something of a milestone in the American cinema. For the first time (in my experience anyway) a Beautiful Woman, on being offered the choice of death or a fate worse than it, chose the fate without a moment’s hesitation or the batting of an eyelid. But Miss Goddard (who gets my vote in the Most Likely to be Unconquered stakes) had apparently a clearer vision of her own destiny at that moment than I had. Anyway, in spite of bondage to the vil- |. lainous Howatd DaSilva, the threat of torture by that sadistic Injun chief Boris Karloff and his squaws, and sundry other adventures, she and Mr. Cooper ‘win through together to the Beginning of }-

the Future, and as the curtain falls are setting out bravely, hand in hand, into it. It is impossible, I thought (as I groped my way numbly to the nearest ‘exit) not to be moved by DeMille. It is of course, impossible not to be moved by a bulldozer when you don’t get out of the way in time, but one can’t dismiss this rambuctious American as simply as that. What DeMille knows (and I wish more directors realised it) is that his medium is the moving picture. Whatever his films may b garish, vulgar, noisy, peopled with impossible characters, acting out impossible stories-they all keep moving. It’s just a pity that with so much movement he rarely gets anywhere.