Another of 20th Century Fox’s big location pictures designed to show off their new CinemaScope process,
Untamed is one of those films that just didn’t work for me on a first viewing, but improved immensely on a second one with revised expectations. The penultimate collaboration of the box-office dream team of Tyrone Power and director Henry King, it has great raw material to work with – the Great Trek and the building of the Dutch Free State in 19th century South Africa – but wastes it as a largely offscreen background to a soapy saga of Susan Hayward’s wilful Irish girl pursuing Power’s Afrikaner commando.
A sort of Gone with the Veldt crossed with a South African Cimarron, Power is hardly in long stretches of the film, a supporting player despite his star billing (he was a late replacement for Robert Mitchum and took the job to get his contract with Fox over with), dropping briefly into the film from time to time like Yancey Cravat before long stretches away with his commandoes, which leaves Hayward to carry the movie. Unfortunately she’s not at her best here: much of the film had to be shot in the US because she faced losing custody of her children in her bitter divorce case if she left the country and was under enough strain to attempt suicide shortly after the film’s release, and under those circumstances it's impressive that she was professional enough to never let it show onscreen, but a bigger problem than her performance is the role she’s saddled with.
Leading on the men around her to get what she wants and not even waiting for her husband’s corpse to get cold before making doe eyes at Power, you keep on hoping for her to get her comeuppance only for her to bounce back like the proverbial bad penny. This wouldn’t be a problem if she was meant to be scheming, manipulative and unlikeable, but despite nods to Scarlett O’Hara she’s clearly meant to be someone we root for and whose determination we admire. Instead you can’t help feeling sorry for Richard Egan’s trekker gone wrong (a role intended for Victor Mature), who goes from dreaming of waking up with something besides his gun to becoming a bad ‘un and, as Peter Cook would say, deficient in the leg department to the tune of one because of the minx repeatedly using him and dumping him (and still he never learns!). Egan may end up wearing the black hat, but if anything Hayward comes across as the real villain of the piece, and you end up hoping that he and Power will ride off into the sunset together leaving the selfish ***** to the mercy of the elements.
The end result is a big budget film where interesting things happen to people we don’t really care about. Fox certainly lavished enough money and talent to keep things from getting boring even if it never hits the highs. Henry King’s direction is efficient but not up to his usual standard, the big battle with the Zulus is spectacular but pales next to Stanley Baker and co’s onscreen engagement eight years later, though the final shootout fares a better even if the film has simply turned into a conventional Western by that point. Still, Rita Moreno does get one great line as Egan's gal when Hayward turns up again -
"What's left of heem eez mynn!" Easily the best thing about the picture is Franz Waxman’s superb score, which captures all the sweeping excitement and romance the film never quite manages, and it gets rewarded with its own isolated score track here. Taken as a big sprawling historical adventure,
Untamed falls short of its potential, but approaching it a new as a big budget formulaic star vehicle (with Hayward rather than Power the star), it’s much more effective. You just need to dial down your expectations for what the film is interested in delivering.
Considering the film never got a proper DVD release outside of a non-anamorphic DVD in Spain and Italy (in the US it was just a manufactured on demand DVD-R), Twilight Time’s region-free Bluray is a genuinely impressive affair boasting an excellent remastered transfer that’s very strong on detail, doesn’t appear to get revisionist with the colour and even is well-timed enough to improve the now somewhat superior back-projection (not invisible but infinitely less noticeable than in previous releases, making the spectacular second unit location footage meld with the US-shot sequences much more convincingly).
Along with the isolated score and customary booklet there’s also the original theatrical trailer, albeit in a rather dupey looking non-anamorphic 1.85:1 but offering an object lesson in old school movie hype -
‘Untamed is Africolossal in CinemaScope… the most violent canvas of love and adventure ever filmed…a cast of thousands… CinemaScope follows her trail of unbridled passions from the Emerald Isle to Darkest Africa… to tell the story of a love so powerful that it defied the laws of God and man..! Amazing sights never before recorded on film!’ No film could live up to all that, but for all its shortcomings Untamed still manages to provide a diverting couple of hours, and it probably hasn’t looked this good since 1955.
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