Great Film overall

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It's sad to see a couple of fine players like Rita Gam and Ted de Corsia caught up in this tawdry excuse for a recap of stock footage from John Ford's infinitely superior "Drums Along the Mohawk" (1939). They struggle doggedly with ridiculous dialogue and clichéd characterizations — to disappointingly little avail. Vera Vague is more at ease with this sort of tosh, as is that staple heavy of the "B" western, Neville Brand. But the normally reliable John Hoyt has the grace to look discomfited. Scott Brady of course couldn't care less, whilst Lori Nelson is stuck with that grating, squawky voice. It says much in fact for the general quality of the acting when I record that the most convincing portrayal comes from Allison Hayes!Production credits are so incompetent that little attempt is made to match or integrate Ford's stock shots with the "new" material. The Neumann/Struss footage is so uniformly lousy that one wonders whatever induced Fox to be a party to such a miscarriage. Why not simply re-issue the Ford film and be done with all this tatty, talentless and impoverished pretense?OTHER VIEWS: At least ten or fifteen minutes of superlative action from "Drums Along the Mohawk" is ineptly married to a risible hodge- podge of cigar-store-Indian hokum about a pioneer painter and a svelte Indian maid. A plot clearly drawn from Broken Arrow has been gutted to supply the framework for Boys Own Paper characters mouthing dialogue from True Romances. Most of the players try mighty hard to give the stupidities of the script some sort of dignity. But the very cheapness of the production with its ill-matching interpolations, its tatty sets and costumes, its featurelessly flat, dull-colored photography, its toes-on-the-mark compositions, overwhelms all well-meant efforts in the end. — JHR writing as Charles Freeman.You could make a wonderfully dreadful little Movie Pak out of Mohawk. Twenty or thirty minutes of the choicest clichés and hammiest acting in those gloriously pokey sets. Not forgetting the songs, those inappropriately rousing choruses over the front and extended end titles. — JHR writing as George Addison.

"Mohawk" is a truly awful movie. In fact, of the 17000 plus films I've reviewed for IMDb, I'd place it among the 10 or so worst movies when it comes to dialog. Yes, the delivery and words the actors speak is simply dreadful. Is it as bad as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Robot Monster"? No...but it's certainly terrible.The film is set during the American colonial period and the Mohawks in the title of the movie are not happy because they're losing their land. But, since the thing was made in the 1950s, they are the bad guys. Despite being set during a pretty exciting time period, however, nothing about this is exciting and the movie is dreadfully slow. But, it's not quite horrible enough to earn a 1...not that this is any consolation.

The IMDb credits state this film was done in Pathecolor, but I have to admit, this was the oddest looking movie I've experienced yet. Repeatedly one has characters in vibrant color back-dropped by scenery or sets in black and white. At times various scenes appear entirely sepia hued, and there are frequent transitions between day and night within the same time frame. More than anything, it appeared to me that someone was hired to colorize a black and white film, and simply decided to do only half the job. Since no one else mentioned this in the other reviews I've read, I might assume it's a quirk of the print I viewed from the Mill Creek Western Collection. So if you have that set, you'll probably experience what I just did.Now I don't know what to make of Scott Brady. He portrays sort of a womanizer in the picture and his taste runs the gamut, but all of his girlfriends are quite attractive. It made me chuckle actually, because in his 1959/1960 TV Western Series 'Shotgun Slade', he also fancied himself somewhat of a ladies man, but in a somewhat laughable sort of way. You'll just have to catch a couple of those episodes to see what I mean.The other reviewers on this board recap this story pretty well so no need to go into detail here. The kick for me was the casting for this flick, with Rita Gam, Lori Nelson and Allison Hayes all vieing for Brady's attention. TV and movie Western fans will no doubt enjoy catching Neville Brand here as a Tuscarora Indian Chief who wants to mix it up with the white soldiers. He's kept in check somewhat by Mohawk Chief Kowanen (Ted DeCorsia), but the picture does manage a fairly thrilling battle to close out the show. And say, did I get this right? That's Mae Clarke as Kowanen's wife Minikah, who a quarter century earlier caught a grapefruit in the smacker from Jimmy Cagney in "The Public Enemy". There's a bit of trivia you'll be glad to know.What's rather interesting to me now that I've watched the picture, I actually rather enjoyed it even though it's pretty clichéd in most respects. Maybe it's because the principal players didn't seem to be taking things all too seriously and just had a good time putting this thing together. The one scene that really stood out for me was when Jonathan Adams (Brady) and Indian babe Onida (Gam) went for a swim, and wound up playing with a Mohawk version of Frisbee.

I remember as a teenager passing a theater poster of a scantily clad Rita Gam and wishing I had the money to go in. I know now what I didn't then-- it was my lucky day. Even a longer look at that shapely leg wouldn't have made up for all the bad acting (deCorsia's wooden Indian should be planted in front of a cigar store), the stupefied poetic dialogue ("You shine like a moon above the stars,"), the ridiculous Hollywood casting (malt-shop teen Tommy Cook as Indian warrior), and the ultra-cheap production values (backgrounds painted by art class dropouts). Heck, they couldn't even stage minimal outdoor battle scenes, using stock shots from 1939's Drums Along the Mohawk instead. Note too, how artificially the Indians emerge from the forest as though they're expecting a parade to pass by. At least the producers knew enough to play up the sex angle with a bevy of Indian maidens apparently recruited from a Las Vegas stage show. I'm just sorry that director Kurt Neumann's name is attached to this misfire. He did manage a number of quality low-budget sci-fi flicks like The Fly (1958), Kronos (1957), and the ground-breaking Rocketship X-M (1950). Maybe there's a lesson here, like it's easier to direct bug-eyed monsters than a bunch of phony Indians.