INDIAN TERRORISM

Evening Star, Issue 23691, 26 September 1940, Page 16

INDIAN TERRORISM

THRILLING FILM FOR STATE Darryl F. Zanuck’s production of ; Drums Along the Mohawk,’ to-mor-row’s attraction for the State, depicts in technicolour the days when torch and tomahawk spread their terror in New York’s beautiful Mohawk Valley, based on Walter D. Edmonds’s best-selling novel. The screen play by Lamar Trotti and Sonya Levieu gives Claudette Colbert and Henry Fonda the roles of pioneer lovers who, with other colonists in the valley, have to face the fierce onslaught of the savage Iroquois. While a heart-warming romance is thus assured, the most outstanding feature of 1 Drums Along the Mohawk ’ is its action. The screen has proved itself time and again as the best medium for portraying scenes like these, but never lias it shown them more powerfully. One is literally frozen to one’s seat at the tense realism of the Indian battle sequences, heightened in their effect by the technicolour. The cast is all uniformly excellent. Featured in it are Edna May Oliver, Eddie Collins, John Carradine, Dorris Bowdon, Jessie Ralph, Arthur Shields, Robert Lowery, and Roger Imhoff. The story takes place in those days of romance and adventure when America was young. Claudette Colbert, an aristocratic, city-bred girl,_ marries Henry Fonda, a farmer-colonist of the Mohawk Valley, as the film opens. Fonda takes his bride to the rough frontier, where her spirit is almost broken by the crude life and surroundings. But, a bravo girl, she perseveres.