The frontier fiction of James Fenimore Cooper--and specifically his so-called "Leatherstocking Tales"--has spawned a number of action-heavy film adaptations spanning Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown's 1920 The Last of the Mohicans to Michael Mann's celebrated, if more plangent take on the same material in 1992. Bridging these two unassailable American epics are numerous on-screen versions of other Cooper novels featuring his recurring frontier hero Natty Bumppo, whose nom de guerre always seemed to change from tale to tale.

In 1950, George Montgomery was cast as Bumppo, alias Nat 'Hawkeye' Cutler, in Phil Karlson's abridged adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans titled The Iroquois Trail. Trailing a brief stint of stardom at Twentieth Century-Fox during World War II, Montgomery was now settling in as an action star excelling in cheap Westerns and other programmers, and another Cooper adaptation was on the horizon.

While The Pathfinder (1952) was nominally adapted from a later entry in the "Leatherstocking Tales" - written at a time when Cooper had some reservations about penning yet another entry in the Natty Bumppo saga -the film version scripted by Robert E. Kent and directed by Sidney Salkow borrowed elements from all five Leatherstocking books and ultimately had little to do with the novel that bears its name. Producer Sam Katzman was clearly striving for was a straight-ahead bareknuckle action picture, with Cooper's original placid love story traded in for perfunctory romance. Only the vibrant Great Lakes setting was retained (although the film was shot in and around California's Malibu Canyon).

The story sees the return of Natty Bumppo, this time saddled with a new moniker - the Pathfinder. Like that of its predecessor, the story takes place in the early years of the French and Indian War, this time with Pathfinder seeking to avenge the recent French massacre of the Mohicans by acting as a British spy and infiltrating the French ranks. However, neither he nor his companion, Mohican tribesman Chingachgook (Jay Silverheels, better known for playing Tonto from The Long Ranger) can speak French, necessitating the enlistment of a woman named Alison (Helena Carter), a refined British woman with French fluency eager to make a fresh go of things after the disgrace of her former husband - a British captain whose drunkenness led him to defect.

While Variety remarked that the actors had a rough time maintaining their accents, the emphasis ultimately lay on the performance of George Montgomery, "...an excellent hero, displaying his muscles in rugged response to the title role's demands." The Pathfinder may not have gone down as one of the superior James Fenimore Cooper adaptations, but like almost every low-budget Columbia Western of the 1950s, it has its roughhewn charms.

By Stuart Collier