Review of Frontier Rangers

Jacques Tourneur was at the height of his career when making this movie. He was making the T.V.-series "Bonanza" and the "Twilight Zone" at the same time in the same year! The former colony of the English Crown was battling the Indians and the French in the north of New-York. The Algonkin Indians with their impressive chief Black Wolf (Larry Chance) fought against special troops, the predecessors of the Rangers under the leadership of General Armherst (Philip Tonge). Major Robert Rogers (Keith Larsen) conducts his Frontier Rangers, who consists mainly of trappers, along the borderline of America occupied by the French and their Indian allies. I was astonished by the trade of women at that time, a commerce of humans in the form that you could buy a woman. The taverns on the border were not only places of trade for furs and furniture but also the place where a dishonest innkeeper could arrange a marriage at a fixed price against the will of the bride. Spoiler: The end of the movie with the massacring of the tribe could be described by nowaday-standards as a form of holocaust but in the perspective of that time it was just a revenge for the hundreds of border-families killed by the Indians. This adventure-movie gives after all a rather precise image of the Eastern part of the U.S. at the beginning of the 18th century.