Unconquered – 1947
I found this to be, I’m sorry to say, a pretty dull movie. It was slow and predictable, and when it came to the special effects, I honestly wasn’t very impressed. By this time, Hollywood had been giving us better special effects for some time, and while a few of the effects were interesting, some even well-done, most of them were just average in quality.
I’ll start with the things I didn’t like. I thought many of the rear-projection shots were poorly done. There, I said it. There was a scene in which two men on horses are being chased by a band of Native American Indian warriors. We start out with several wide shots filmed in the real outdoors. But then when we needed to see a closeup of the actors’ faces, the process photography began, and it was painfully obvious, so much so that it took me out of the story. It forced me to notice that the actors weren’t connected to their background. The lighting, the focus, and the color saturation were all different.
Then there was the big escape sequence in which there heroes were once again running from Indians. This time they were in a canoe on a river. They were supposed to be going through rapids, but the close-up shots of the actors were perfectly steady, ignoring the turbulence of the wide shots. But on the other hand, there were some pretty good effects like the climax of that river escape, and the Indian attack on fort Pitt at the end of the movie.
As the little canoe goes over a waterfall, Gregory Peck, with Paulette Goddard tied to him with a sash, grabs onto a long hanging branch of a tree. The bow bends and lowers the couple to safety and concealment. As the boat sails over the edge, we are treated to a wide shot and a pair of dark, out of focus, animated figures. We switch to a close-up of the pair hanging from the branch, and then back to the wide shot as we see tree bending under their weight. I’ll admit, that was a good effect.
The fort Pitt sequence was alright, but just barely. Some great miniatures were used, combined with some competent compositing. The Indian warriors were hurling fireballs and shooting flaming arrows, and they were real enough to inflict burn injuries on eight people. One extra’s hair was reportedly singed as well. There was even one really cool transitional shot where a fireball was hurled at the camera, exploding in a rush of flames which faded into the next scene. Very cool.
But as a whole, I’m afraid that the effects for this movie just seemed too few and far between. And the ones that were done were either substandard or simplistic. Sure, the attack on Fort Pitt was well-choreographed, but it wasn’t as dazzling as I have come to expect from big-budget Hollywood movies of the 1940s. I’ve seen earlier movies do a better job.