UNCONQUERED

1947, 135 mins. 35 mm print source: UCLA Film & TV Archive. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Written by Charles Bennett, Fredric M. Frank, Jesse Lasky Jr. and Neil H. Swanson. Produced by Cecil B. DeMille. Photographed by Ray Rennahan. Edited by Anne Bauchens. Original Music by Victor Young. Art Direction by Hans Dreier and Walter H. Tyler. Costume Design by Gwen Wakeling. Principal Cast: Gary Cooper (Christopher Holden), Paulette Goddard (Abby), Howard Da Silva (Garth), Boris Karloff (Guyasuta, Chief of the Senecas), Cecil Kellaway (Jeremy Love), Ward Bond (John Fraser), Virginia Campbell (Mrs. Fraser), Katherine DeMille (Hannah), Henry Wilcoxon (Capt. Steele), Sir C. Aubrey Smith (Lord Chief Justice), Victor Varconi (Capt. Simeon Ecuyer), Raymond Hatton (Venango Scout).

Production started: July 29, 1946. Production finished: November 8, 1946. Production reopened for pick-up shots: November 25-26, 1946. Additional pick-up shots: December 10 and December 30, 1946. Added scene shot: May 5, 1947. Second unit location work: June 5-23, 1946 at Cook Forest, Pennsylvania; and July 15 to August 4, 1946 at Ashton & McCall, Idaho. Length: 13,194 feet. Released: October 3,1947.


Program notes written by Robert S. Birchard for a Cecil B. DeMille retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image in 1989. (Birchard's book Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood will be published in June 2004 by the University Press of Kentucky):

Perhaps it is reading too much into this rousing adventure to state that Unconquered is a film of serious intent, but DeMille's film might be compared to John Ford's more somber treatment of the pre-revolutionary era, Drums Along the Mohawk (20th Century-Fox, 1939). Despite its action and spectacle, Ford's film is a human scale drama whereas the DeMille picture is an epic mythological narrative.

Ford's characters are tragic figures. They may question why they should fight for their way of life, but they are already committed to the American dream and their actions are inevitable. In the DeMille film the dream is yet to be formulated. In fact, the characters with the most freedom are the villains who also show the least social responsibility, and the hero acts with some ambivalence as he buys the freedom of one woman and seeks to bind another in a marriage that she does not want.

In Unconquered DeMille resorts to the hoariest of devices to push his story along. He was criticized by The New York Times' Bosley Crowther for lifting the "dead soldiers" rescues from Beau Geste (written in 1924 and filmed in 1926 and 1939). In his autobiography DeMille claimed to have borrowed the scene from an old stage melodrama "…about the Sepoy rebellion, called, I think it was, Jessie Brown. " In admitting his debt to this forgotten play DeMille said much about his own work, for he never abandoned the conventions of the 19th century melodrama in constructing his screenplays.

DeMille was also a student of film, of course, and it does seem more than a coincidence that the daring rescue as the canoe goes over the falls bears a striking similarity to a scene in Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality (1923). Borrow from two, and it's research!