NORTHWEST PASSAGE (M.G-M)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 76, 6 December 1940, Page 51

NORTHWEST PASSAGE (M.G-M)

T took M-G-M two big pictures to deal justly by Thomas Edison. It is going to take them at least the same number to discover the North-

west Passage. Their film version of Kenneth Roberts's best-seller covers only the first, more bloodthirsty part of the Narrative, and everybody in the story is so busy slaughtering Indians and getting away with a whole topknot that there is hardly time even to talk about the northwest passage, much less look for it. That will come however: M-G-M have promised us a sequel with the same cast. If the second film is as well done as the first it should be worth looking out for. Though "Northwest Passage" (or,

as it is more correctly sub-titled, "Rogers’s Rangers") is preoccupied with the subject of massacring Redskins -to the exclusion of all but the flimsiest " jove-interest "-it is very much more than routine Cowboys-and-Indians melodrama. In point of fact, cowboys weren't thought of at the period of this storyround about 1759, when the British and French were engaged in an unpleasant but adventurous type of warfare for control of North America, with aid from any Indians who could be persuaded to come in on one side or the other. Instead of cowboys there are the Rangers of Major Robert Rogers, a very tough and interesting customer very toughly and interestingly portrayed by Spencer Tracy. These hardy fighters wear natty green buckskin uniforms which, unless I’m mistaken, served as a pattern for those worn later by the King’s Royal Riffe Corps; and in their enthusiasm for scalp-hunting they undergo the most remarkable hardships. In order to wipe off some old scores they embark on an expedition to wipe out an entire settlement cf Abenaki Indians at St. Francis. After dodging Frenchmen but not mos-

quitoes, pulling their whale-boats up mountain sides, wading waist deep through swamps for days, sleeping in the forks of trees like bedraggled wildfowl, and forming a human chain to cross the torrential St. Francis River, the Rangers arrive at their destination. Here the Abenaki Indians are all obligingly suffering from a hangover, so the work of massacre is well under way before the victims are properly awake. Though the Rangers on the screen are slightly more humane than their originals in the book and spare an occasional woman and child, the massacre sequence is gory and _ thorough-going enough to satisfy the blood-lust of any audience-and may disgust a few of the more sensitive spirits. Liquidating the Abenakis doesn’t seem to settle the

Indian problem, however, and the hardships encountered by the Rangers on the way up are nothing to those encountered on the way. back. After other Indians and Frenchmen have harassed them, and famine has wasted them, about a-third of the force is at last led by the indomitable Major to a fort where they can receive a square meal and the thanks of the grateful British. We last see what is left of the gallant band marching off refreshed to look for that northwest passage in Part Two. Mest impressive feature of the filmmore impressive even that Tracy’s virile performance or Director King Vidor’s flair for realism in blood-letting-is the technicolour photography, which paints .the woods and lakes of the northwest in such lovely tints that they bring home, even more forcibly than the story, the realisation that only man is vile. If you like adventure stories, this should be your meat-very red meat.