Albany, New York, 1776. After marrying, Gil and Lana travel north to settle on a small farm in the Mohawk River Valley, but soon their growing prosperity and happiness are threatened by the sinister sound of drums that announce dark times of revolution and war.
Claudette Colbert Henry Fonda Edna May Oliver Eddie Collins John Carradine Dorris Bowdon Jessie Ralph Arthur Shields Robert Lowery Roger Imhof Francis Ford Ward Bond Kay Linaker Russell Simpson Spencer Charters Si Jenks Jack Pennick Arthur Aylesworth Chief John Big Tree Charles Tannen Paul McVey Tiny Jones Beulah Hall Jones Edwin Maxwell Robert Greig Clara Blandick Frank Baker Ruth Clifford George Huggins Show All…
Al redoblar de tambores, Mohawks op het oorlogspad, Erämaan rummut, Liekehtivä erämaa, Flammer over Mohawk, Flammende villmark, Bubny víří, Πύρινος χείμαρρος, Vlammende wouden, Trommeln am Mohawk, La più grande avventura, Onder één vlag, Sur la piste des Mohawks, Corazones indomables, モホークの太鼓, Bębny nad Mohawkiem, Dobok a Mohawk mentén, Ouvem-se Tambores ao Longe, Барабаны долины Махонке, Ao Rufar dos Tambores, Tambores de guerra, Flammande vildmark, 铁血金戈, 모호크족의 북소리
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Albany, New York
USA
New York Film Festival
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Brazil
Mexico
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Sweden15
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USA
Italy
Spain12
Japan
Germany12
Brazil
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Portugal
Spain
Sweden
UK
USA
If you’re ever feeling masochistically unproductive, think back on how John Ford released three essential American films in one year.
“Drums Along the Mohawk” accompanies “Stagecoach” and “Young Mr. Lincoln” as Ford’s 1939 informal trilogy on Manifest Destiny. “Stagecoach” depicted its dark effect on men’s souls, “Lincoln,” its swaying of politics, and “Mohawk,” its ramifications on the American family and home.
“Mohawk” is set in the time of the Revolutionary War — geographically, a little closer to the old world than its counterparts. Unfolding in the valleys of upstate New York, its frontier is only a few days journey from the capital of Albany.
Fittingly, this proximity to ‘civilization’ makes for a more muddled clash of ideologies and priorities than…
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Pretty lifeless, but when you release two masterpieces in the very same year (Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln), it's fine if this 1939 colonial drama doesn't compare. Very much a film in the midst of myth, so it's less complicated, and therefore less interesting, than major Ford films. But the seeds are there. Offers up some gorgeous early Technicolor photography, and Ward Bond gets hit by a flaming arrow in the shoulder!
John Ford's politics, let alone the politics of his films, cannot be reduced to an identification like 'reactionary'. This type of thinking exists to blind you to the very things Ford wanted to show, which were the contradictions that people live in and through on account of living in history. This is apparently beyond the scope of the way people watch films now. You know very well that one of the reasons Ford redid the Cobb stories in 53 was because Fox cut out the lynching scene. Do you think Ford didn't realise he was depicting a racist society? If you think in these terms, of 'apologia', 'framework', 'reactionary', you are never going to get anywhere.
Ou:
That you want…
Gets a (minor) pass for being Ford’s third best work of its given year alone, but for my money (a Ford tolerator if not quite yet a fanboy), it’s plain at best and stale as a bread bin with holes a-plenty at worst. More painful still is how it squanders a perfectly capable cast of classical charmers and its directors unmatched eye for the all-encompassing, genre-emblematic vistas, as ready-made for framing and wearing up on your nearest wall (fittingly, with a Technicolor that feels only as washed out as the personalities of its front-and-centre Revolutionary saviours). All to ask of you to pick the poison of your choosing; casual racism, or a reduction of the wonderful Claudette Colbert to the lowly housewife fit only for filling the pockets of shrill, melodramatic fantasy.
Better luck next time, Ms. Colbert.
Living on the frontier. This belongs to a recurring 20s/30s sub-genre about settler life that was already disappearing by 1939 as the country moved further from the 19th century. Those movies are usually slotted as westerns even though most of them are very light on action, which is not the case on Drums as it doubles as a Revolutionary War movie and there is lots of violent conflict. Of course, the time frame puts it long before the west expansion, the frontier is the east. Ford's achievement has a lot to do with its sense of constant danger. The way community is constantly haunted by it, this is a movie about a newlywed couple and their hopes which are tainted…
Ford creates America along the margins; the war rages to the east, but the vicious frontier skirmishes truly put everything on the line for this new land. Homes built by hand and farms roughly toiled are burned to cinders, and women and children die alongside the men. In this shellshocked vision of the Revolution, distinctions between American, British and Indian matter less than individual action and communal engagement. For the most part there is no plot; even the raids orchestrated by Tories to completely disrupt settler life are predicated on surprise and besiegement instead of the mounting preparation a narrative would provide. Instead, Ford hangs about with the community as they find humor and warmth in each other against a backdrop that works overtime to hollow them out. When they proudly hoist a newly woven Old Glory above their fort at the end, it is in tribute to their microcosmic victory over the victory of their new nation.
Running to bring reinforcements to the besieged fort, Henry Fonda and three chasing braves are cast in silhouette across a blood red dawn that takes up 80% of the screen. He’s an American Philippides. This is myth making of the highest order.
The chimerical Technicolor palette lends to the mythic tone. Claudette Colbert exchanging a wedding bouquet for a burned-out cabin, patrician colonial security for precarious Self-Reliance, is a metaphor for the risks the Revolutionary Americans took. The obdurate and generous Edna May Oliver best embodies why they succeeded.
Like his westerns, this is set the jagged edge of the frontier, “way out on a limb” where cultures meet, to borrow Alan Lemay’s phrase from The Searchers. Ford’s again concerned…
Release date: November 10, 1939
A real red sky in the morning is the backdrop as the camera sees Henry Fonda outrun three Native Indians in fast pursuit. All filmed in glorious three-strip Technicolor.
John Ford brings the real world front and center, with actors chopping down real trees. All to show the real-life hardships of the wilderness.
Lana (Claudette Colbert), from the town of Albany, NY, moves to the wilderness in 1776 with her new husband Gilbert (Henry Fonda). A land that requires hard work and hard fighting, and that includes the women too.
It would be easy to focus all the attention on the young couple, but John Ford shows the community as a whole: black, white, Indian, and the old folks too.
The mythology of life in the American wilderness juxtaposed against my daily dilemma of which film to watch.
Drums Along the Mohawk is a John Ford film from 1939 that LB doesn't consider a Western? It has Ford, it has Henry Fonda, and Ward Bond too, but it's down here as a historical war drama? I suppose that description fits the film, with an adventure angle thrown into the mix too, but it still definitely looks and feels like a John Ford film, Western or not!
Ford's film takes a look at frontier life in upstate New York circa 1776 as the Revolutionary War looms large. Fonda's Gil Martin and his new bride Lana (Claudette Colbert) arrive in Deerfield, to Gil's small farm in the wilderness. Lana is initially horrified and frightened of everything, but soon they settle…
This is John Ford's first color film and it's a sight to behold. Gorgeous photography and landscapes abound. There is one particular montage of Henry Fonda running from Natives against a sun setting backdrop that just leaves you awestruck. It's the quintessential colonial drama and no surprise it was released in the watershed year of 1939. It being such an old classic, there is a deep-seated purity to the old cabin in the woods lifestyle that never makes you question authenticity. This being a John Ford film, it is a story of the white man's fight against an "unjust", faceless swarm of Indians. Once you get past this inherent prejudice, it plays as an often exhilarating adventure film with just the right mix of melodrama. Claudette Colbert is a peach in technicolor.
The lesser known and less valued of Ford’s astounding 1939 output (the other two were Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln) and his first colour film ever, Drums along the Mohawk is, probably, a much underrated film owing to several presumptions and some disappointed expectations. In the first place, it turns out (as with so many other Ford movies) not to be a western, but geographically quite an eastern, certainly with Indians and pioneers, and even with war, although not the Civil War but the War of Independence, not in the 19th but in the 18th century. And, though it stars the already ‘Fordian’ Henry Fonda, his co-star is the not very Fordian (although she’s very good here) Claudette Colbert.
One…
