It's sad to see a couple of fine players like Rita Gam and Ted de Corsia caught up in this tawdry excuse for a recap of stock footage from John Ford's infinitely superior "Drums Along the Mohawk" (1939). They struggle doggedly with ridiculous dialogue and clichéd characterizations — to disappointingly little avail.
Vera Vague is more at ease with this sort of tosh, as is that staple heavy of the "B" western, Neville Brand. But the normally reliable John Hoyt has the grace to look discomfited. Scott Brady of course couldn't care less, whilst Lori Nelson is stuck with that grating, squawky voice. It says much in fact for the general quality of the acting when I record that the most convincing portrayal comes from Allison Hayes!
Production credits are so incompetent that little attempt is made to match or integrate Ford's stock shots with the "new" material. The Neumann/Struss footage is so uniformly lousy that one wonders whatever induced Fox to be a party to such a miscarriage. Why not simply re-issue the Ford film and be done with all this tatty, talentless and impoverished pretense?
OTHER VIEWS: At least ten or fifteen minutes of superlative action from "Drums Along the Mohawk" is ineptly married to a risible hodge- podge of cigar-store-Indian hokum about a pioneer painter and a svelte Indian maid. A plot clearly drawn from Broken Arrow has been gutted to supply the framework for Boys Own Paper characters mouthing dialogue from True Romances. Most of the players try mighty hard to give the stupidities of the script some sort of dignity. But the very cheapness of the production with its ill-matching interpolations, its tatty sets and costumes, its featurelessly flat, dull-colored photography, its toes-on-the-mark compositions, overwhelms all well-meant efforts in the end. — JHR writing as Charles Freeman.
You could make a wonderfully dreadful little Movie Pak out of Mohawk. Twenty or thirty minutes of the choicest clichés and hammiest acting in those gloriously pokey sets. Not forgetting the songs, those inappropriately rousing choruses over the front and extended end titles. — JHR writing as George Addison.
Vera Vague is more at ease with this sort of tosh, as is that staple heavy of the "B" western, Neville Brand. But the normally reliable John Hoyt has the grace to look discomfited. Scott Brady of course couldn't care less, whilst Lori Nelson is stuck with that grating, squawky voice. It says much in fact for the general quality of the acting when I record that the most convincing portrayal comes from Allison Hayes!
Production credits are so incompetent that little attempt is made to match or integrate Ford's stock shots with the "new" material. The Neumann/Struss footage is so uniformly lousy that one wonders whatever induced Fox to be a party to such a miscarriage. Why not simply re-issue the Ford film and be done with all this tatty, talentless and impoverished pretense?
OTHER VIEWS: At least ten or fifteen minutes of superlative action from "Drums Along the Mohawk" is ineptly married to a risible hodge- podge of cigar-store-Indian hokum about a pioneer painter and a svelte Indian maid. A plot clearly drawn from Broken Arrow has been gutted to supply the framework for Boys Own Paper characters mouthing dialogue from True Romances. Most of the players try mighty hard to give the stupidities of the script some sort of dignity. But the very cheapness of the production with its ill-matching interpolations, its tatty sets and costumes, its featurelessly flat, dull-colored photography, its toes-on-the-mark compositions, overwhelms all well-meant efforts in the end. — JHR writing as Charles Freeman.
You could make a wonderfully dreadful little Movie Pak out of Mohawk. Twenty or thirty minutes of the choicest clichés and hammiest acting in those gloriously pokey sets. Not forgetting the songs, those inappropriately rousing choruses over the front and extended end titles. — JHR writing as George Addison.