Nonureva Really Surprised!

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Claire Dunne One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Ross622 John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk is the absolute best colonial movie ever made that reminds of why we became a country in the first place. The movie stars Henry Fonda as Gil Martin a farmer who has just been married and then had to serve in the American revolution, (which the beginning is similar to High Noon for when it comes to the beginning of the film but has more of a similar story to Roland Emmerich's 2000 colonial epic The Patriot.). Not only does Henry Fonda give a great performance but so does Claudette Colbert as his newlywed wife. Not only do I think personally that it is the best movie made about the revolutionary war, but it is also a great period piece. Back then it really took a lot to make movies about how our country started. And i think that this goes as one of John Ford's best films.

thinker1691 An early novel called " Drums Along the Mohawk " written by Walter D. Edmonds is the foundation for this motion picture of the same name. It relates the story of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Martin (Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert) a young, married America couple moving from New York city to the early frontier to begin a new life. The time coincides with events from 1776 thru the end of the Revolutionary War. As most Americans have learned from our history, life was incredibly harsh. Indeed, when not working on the toils of the farm, early colonists were often at war with the Native American tribes who had sided with the British army. After their farm is burned and losing their first child, their lives are constantly threatened, they move in with Mrs. McKlennar (Edna May Oliver) a wealthy widow woman to supplement their meager existence. Most of the film is dedicated to the hardship of early frontier life and includes the destruction of their farms and their valiant defense inside the nearby fort. John Carradine, plays the heavy named Caldwell with Arthur Shields playing Rev. Rosenkrantz. For many reasons John Ford creates a formula for the movie establishing himself as a superb director. This early Color picture is fabulous in many ways, not the least is the excellent cast and exciting drama. It's little wonder it has become an excellent Classic. Recommended for all audiences. ****

mammigirl Drum along the Mohawk was John Fords first film that he used Technicolor in. The scenery and the colors in the film were great to see. The emotions on Lana and Gilbert Martins face were good. Especially in the scene where the Indians burn their house down. As they are getting ready to leave the camera focuses back on the house being burnt and then right to their faces and you can tell that they knew they lost everything. The sounds of the gun shots and canon being let off during the fight between the town and the Indians was a great scene to see and hear. You could tell the Indians were coming cause they would chant or you would see smoke from them burning houses down. In the end the town won by the help that Gil went to get.

tieman64 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.