User Reviews

George Montgomery stars in a minor western matinée feature that is a takeoff of "The Last of the Mohicans". Here, the plot angle has the Pathfinder and his Indian sidekick on a mission to divine French plans for an attack on the U.S. colonies in the Great Lakes region. The French have enlisted hostile Mingo Indians to enlist them in ousting the colonists during the French and Indian War. The two heroes path is fraught with danger as they trek through the wilderness with a pretty French interpreter who supplies the romantic interest for the Pathfinder. The technicolor is good and in spite of a thin story line, the film is worth watching for the nostalgia the fine supporting cast offers.

George Montgomery is well cast as Natty Bumpo in this handsome version of James Fennimore Cooper's novel. He's off on a spying mission on French forces along with Helena Carter. Jay Silverheels is Chingachgook, Chief Yowlachie --sometimes known as Daniel Simmons, back in the day when he was an opera singer -- and Rodd Redwing make up the Amerindian contingent of the actors, although they all derived from tribes far afield from the Algonquins.

There's nothing out of the ordinary in this Sam Katzman production when it comes to scripting or acting, but Henry Freulich's Technicolor camerawork is certainly well done, showing off the French blues that all the French characters wear.

James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder has George Montgomery playing a defector after Montgomery in the title role and Jay Silverheels as Chingachgook find the Mohican tribe completely wiped out with only young Uncas left to tell the tale.

It was the Delaware tribe who have lined up with the French as the French and Indian War has started.

With Silverheels as a contact, Montgomery goes to the French and offers to be a guide. His mission is to determine their strength. He also has along with him Helena Carter who speaks French because he does not speak a word.

Routine action/adventure from Sam Katzman who was getting a bit more budget to work with since leaving Monogram.

Bloodless battle scenes are interspersed with fairly well-written dialogue scenes in this inexpensive (but in good 50's color) tale of Indians, French and English conflict. George Montgomery and Jay Silverheels ("Tonto") are dashing, and the first Helena Carter is pretty and plucky. Like a TV dinner served in a tin tray, this film is pure "comfort". I haven't read the book, but I'd bet that the plot is pretty close except for the love story (in Cooper, romantic incidents are usually mental but never become physical). If you know Cooper better than I do (I've only read "Mohicans"), please add a comment.

Jay Silverheels makes a far less unlikely Chingachgook than Lon Chaney in the later TV series, but gets a fraction of the screen time.

At least this perfunctory Sam Katzman production boasts Technicolor, attractive locations and the handsome Helena Carter; not that leading man George Montgomery deserves her since he's so boorish towards her, even after he's supposedly fallen in love with her.

"The Pathfinder" is a film based on the James Fenimore Cooper novel. A different famous novel is his "Last of the Mohicans"....both of which have been made into films many times...partly, I am sure, due to the stories being in the public domain. However, like too many stories, the Hollywood versions often play fast and loose with the plots and little of the original ends up in the film. Such is the case with this movie. It is good...but not a lot like the original source material. Just once I'd love to see a version where Pathfinder is referred to by his real name, Natty Bumppo!

In this version, George Montgomery plays Pathfinder and his best friend, Chingachgook, is played by Jay Silverheels (of "The Lone Ranger" fame). The film must have been seen as a prestige picture, as uncharacteristic of 1950s westerns and action films, it's in vivid color...especially since it was from Columbia Pictures...a studio which at the time was famous more for making cheap B-westerns. In many ways, the film plays like a western...set in the mid-west/eastern United States in the 1750s-60s...before the even was a United States.

So is the film any good? Yes. The acting is very good and the production values likewise. A good action/adventure film that held my interest througout. Had they stuck to the original story, no doubt I would have rated it a bit higher.

By the way, this is not a serious complaint, but when the British attacked the French with cannon fire, you see cannonballs hit and large groups of men all around it falling to the ground, dead. Well, in the 1700s, cannonballs did NOT explode and send shrapnel everywhere...this was developed around 1800. Instead, the cannonball would bash into people and kill them that way...far less effective and totally unlike the deaths in the film. This is the sort of thing you learn when you are a history teacher like I used to be.

For some reason, Hollywood has always taken more interest in the Old West than in the Even Older East. The opening up of the eastern half of the North American continent during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century has inspired comparatively few films compared with the vast number about "how the West was won". Even the War of Independence has not been a particularly popular subject, despite its central role in American history, and "The Pathfinder" is one of the few films about the French and Indian War. (Others include the Daniel Day-Lewis "The Last of the Mohicans" from 1992, another version of that story from 1936, which I have not seen, and "North-West Passage" from the 1950s).

Like "The Last of the Mohicans", "The Pathfinder" was one of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking" novels, all centred upon the character of Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye. In this film, however, the main character is always simply referred to as "the Pathfinder", and his real name is never mentioned. He is a white man who grew up among American Indians; such characters were popular with the makers of Westerns because they possessed all the hunting and tracking skills of the Indians and represented something exotic, yet could still be shown in romantic relationships with white heroines without breaching the Production Code's strictures against miscegenation. (I know that by the fifties it was becoming acceptable to show a white hero in love with a beautiful Indian maiden, provided she was played by a white actress, as was done in "Broken Arrow" and "Across the Wide Missouri", but the opposite scenario would still have been taboo).

Although the setting is in what would today be part of the eastern United States, the film is officially classified as a Western because at this period much of upstate New York was still regarded as the Wild West. Both the British and the French had Indian allies during the war; in general the Algonquian-speaking tribes favoured the British and their Iroquoian enemies the French. The film opens with a massacre of the pro-British Mohican tribe by the pro-French Mingo; this leads to the Pathfinder and his Mohican blood-brother Chingachgook enlisting in the service of the British. The plot revolves around a British plan to sabotage a road that the French have built to supply their forts. There is also a sub-plot involving a romance between the Pathfinder and Alison, a young Englishwoman who speaks fluent French and is therefore used as a spy to discover the French plans.

"The Pathfinder" is not a well-known movie today; I note that mine is only the seventh review it has received. One reviewer says that the film must have been seen as a "prestige picture" at the time because it was made in colour, but by the fifties colour was fast becoming the default option for Westerns, even though monochrome was still more commonly used for some other genres such as crime dramas. In its battle with the new enemy, television, Hollywood wanted to make sure that the scenery of the Great American Outdoors was seen to its best advantage.

Had this been a prestige picture, doubtless bigger-name stars than George Montgomery and Helena Carter would have been cast in the leading roles and more would have been spent upon the action sequences. It cannot really compare in quality or in its acting with the 1992 "Last of the Mohicans", which really was a prestige picture. And yet, nearly seventy years on, it still remains a watchable adventure movie for Sunday afternoon viewing. 6/10.