"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.
