Very well executed

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK is a full-colour, full-blooded settler western made by the iconic John Ford. It's one of the favourites movies I've seen from him. The story sees a youthful and handsome Henry Fonda playing a settler who must protect his family against various frontier challenges, from political revolt and turmoil to attacks by local Native Americans. DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK is a well-paced production with superlative production values and real depth to the story. Fonda is excellent as the protagonist driven to the edge while the likes of John Carradine prove up to the challenge in support. For a film made in 1939, this one feels surprisingly modern, with a tough edge that really pays off.

The biggest star here is the cinematography. The daylight exteriors are as luscious as it gets. Someone really had a feel for time and place in this one. Sets and set dressing are exquisite as well, with a real colonial feel, gritty and rough-hewn. Superb Technicolor. Of the stars, a youthful, gangly Henry Fonda is exuberant and innocent. Claudette Colbert is a little old for this role, but she pulls it off magnificently, giving a little touch of "robbing the cradle". A troupe of great character actors, including Ward Bond and Edna Oliver, round out the subtext. The result is an engaging, rollicking Technicolor romp that delivers the entertainment goods.

In 1776, the apolitical farmer Gilbert 'Gil' Martin (Henry Fonda) gets married to Magdelana "Lana" Borst (Claudette Colbert) at the Borst Home in Albany, New York. They travel to his lands in the Mohawk Valley, Deerfield, where they work hard to improve their lives, but their house and crop are burned out by Indians fomented by the British. The couple loses everything including their baby and they have to restart their lives working for the widow Mrs. McKlennar (Edna May Oliver). But it is times of the American War of Independence, and the settlers have to fight against the Indians and the British soldiers to survive. "Drums along the Mohawk" is a romance in times of the American War of Independence. John Ford uses the historic moment as background of the tough life of the American colonists in the Mohawk Valley, through the dramatic lives of Gil and Lana. This is not my favorite film of John Ford, but the story is engaging and it is a good movie. The thirty-six year old Claudette Colbert is miscast and too old for the role of Lana. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Ao Rufar dos Tambores" ("At the Drum Roll")

John Ford directs "Drums Along the Mohawk". It's a gorgeous looking film, though Ford's considerable compositional talents only serve to distract us from what is really a pretty hokey attempt at American myth making.The plot? A group of likable colonists travel to the ominously named Mohawk Valley. Led by the always watchable Henry Fonda (what is it about this guy that makes him so endearing?), they build homes, raise families and tend to their well manicured farms.Conflicts, of course, then arise when the settlers are forced to battle the British Army and a variety of Native American Indian tribes. Armed with muskets and pitchforks our Colonist heroes bravely fend off savage Red Coats and barbaric Red Skins, pausing occasionally to mourn the loss of their loved ones and to lament the burning of their homes.The film ends with the settlers eventually emerging victorious. The British are kicked out of America and the Indians are sourly beaten, leaving our merry band of Colonists to huddle together, babies in their arms and smiles on their faces, as the newly created American flag is hoisted up into the sky. "There's still a lot of work to be done," one character says, as the flag flutters in the wind.You either accept this stuff - essentially a cartoonish apologia for genocide, xenophobia, colonialism and a type of American exceptionalism that continues unabated even to this day - or you don't. Me, I'll take Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs Miller", an exercise in demythologisation, and a much more interesting account of settlers struggling to "build America". Still, if Ford is a man of simple intellect, he's nevertheless one of cinema's great visualists.Forget "The Searchers" and forget Monument Valley. Mohawk Valley is where it's at. Made in the late 30s, "Drums Along The Mohawk" is Ford's first and best looking colour film. With some darkly lush film-stock and a colour palette that oozes deep greens, rustic browns and the husky glow of cackling firelight, the film is gorgeous to look at. Ford's compositions are clean and uncluttered, simple objects like chairs, muskets, clouds and trees placed with the precision of a classical painter.But for those looking for action, the film also delivers quite a few tense set pieces. Several battles, foot chases and an attack on a fort, all add a visceral kick to the melodrama. Whilst the likes of Peckinpah, Siegel and Leone have rendered many of Ford's "action sequences" old fashioned (those once lauded cavalry charges in many of Ford's films now seem comical rather than gripping), the "action" in "Mohawk" has a painterly quality seldom found in the rest of his career. Think late career Kurosawa and mid-career Lean.So while most of the usual Fordian problems are here - caricatural Indians, jokey old timers, pesky drunks, shameless melodrama, grating music, hokey myth-making, ill-placed comedy, propagandistic history - I'd argue that the sheer "look" of the film is really something special. But is technique enough?7.9/10 – Thematically and stylistically, Ford was very much a traditionalist. Like most directors of the era (and since), he was trapped in the mentality of the theatre director. This is the belief that cinema only adds a larger canvas to the possibilities already afforded by the theatre stage. IE – we start with some grand landscape shot and then pull in to the key players, acting out the story within a room or small set. This formula is then repeated in various permutations. Compare this to the plasticity of Welles, Resnais or the curious camera of mid-Hitchcock, to see how limited Ford's vocabulary really was, even for its time. And yet, cinema has progressed so little in the past century, that this film, made in the 30s, still feels rather fresh. Compare, for example, "Drums Along The Mohawk" to Baz Luhrmann's "Australia". Both films are attempts to sanitise history, but Luhrmann's demonstrates just how impossible it is for many modern directors to escape the shadow of Ford.Worth one viewing.