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.
