Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Cooktopi The acting in this movie is really good.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

utgard14 Exciting dramatic story of a Colonial pioneer couple (Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert) from the start of their marriage through the end of the Revolutionary War. This is John Ford's first Technicolor picture. For a director who made such great use of shadow in his black & white movies, it must have been quite the adjustment to get used to color. Not just from a technical standpoint, but from an artistic one as well. But he does a spectacular job here. Great supporting cast includes an eyepatch-wearing John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Edna May Oliver. Oliver steals the show, as she often did. She received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work. Fonda and Colbert are excellent, as well. A wonderful film full of romance, drama, action, humor, and tragedy. For a modern American viewer like myself it's refreshing to see these older nonjudgmental films that pay respect to our forefathers. It couldn't be made today.

mhesselius John Ford is an enigma. He has great virtues and vices as a director. Unfortunately, in this film (as in the Searchers) all his worst qualities are on display. Instead of the inherently dramatic events from Walter Edmonds' novel about Revolutionary War farmers in upstate New York, troubled by divisions within the community between Tories and Patriots, we get Ford's unmistakable brand of maudlin sentiment, and the hysterics of characters who are so simplistically rendered they'll remind you of children pretending.Ford also violates a cardinal rule of good film making by having Henry Fonda's character, Gil Martin, deliriously narrate to his wife the details of his experience in the battle of Oriskany. The scene is static, and Martin's story would have been better shown, not told. But Ford's movies are never entirely without interest. The best part of this movie (an action sequence where Henry Fonda has to outrun some Native American warriors) is a fine set-piece, but the characters have absolutely no dimension. I think Ford worked best when his producers reined him in. We can see this in STAGECOACH, in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, and in FORT APACHE. But when they gave him his head he could turn out cloying material like DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, THE SEARCHERS, and RIO GRANDE.In 1939 the three strip Technicolor process was Hollywood's new toy. In most early color features the new medium was the message; story and character development took a back seat as they do here. If you love melodrama and films with lots of action but not much depth, this one might appeal to you.

smatysia A regular John Ford classic. Claudette Colbert played her role well, but her character was initially quite unlikeable. I suppose this was to show her personal growth over the course of the film. Fonda was, of course, Fonda, a bottomless pit of earnestness. Edna May Oliver was wonderful as the widow. She got an Ocar nomination, but too bad for her that this was the same year as Gone With the Wind and Hattie McDaniel.A few commentators have lamented that Ford caricatured the Indians and portrayed them as unfairly savage. If anything they were portrayed as not nearly as savage as reality. The North American Indians in general, and the Iriquois in particular, were among the most savage and bloodthirsty races on earth. At least two instances from the film struck me letting them off much too easy. When the widow McKlennar is surprised in her bed by two warriors burning her house, she browbeats them into carrying her out of the room on her bed. These Indians would have immediately tomahawked her to death on the spot. And when the captive is rolled out to be burnt below the walls of the fort, well, the Indians would almost certainly have tortured him to death for their own amusement. There was no military advantage to letting the fort know that he was captured, and the Indians torture of captives was well known. It was a large part of their culture. which was utterly martial. The fort would never surrender, because only torture and death awaited those who did. (On rare occasions captives would be kept alive as slaves, and rarer still, a few were adopted into the tribe) The British would sometimes encourage these massacres, and sometimes try to stop them, almost never with any success. No amount of politically correct revisionism changes what these Indian societies were in those days.

Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) I first saw "Drums" dubbed in French at age 7 in front of an old small-screen black and white early TV set in the fifties in my native Quebec. In spite of the bad quality of the print and the primitive technology, it struck me – even then - as elaborately engrossing. But its depictions of Indian attacks warped me for life. For all the political correctness talk of Aboriginal-sensitive commentaries that bemoan the fact that Indians are portrayed like the flying monkeys from "The Wizard of Oz", the fact remains that of the more than 300 native cultures in North America, Mohawks were the most violent and troublesome. They were s.o.b.'s then and they are s.o.b.'s now and forever getting into trouble with the laws of my native Quebec (which offered them asylum after the war and to this day), neighbouring Ontario and New York State. They may have fought against the Revolution but we were stuck with them for 250 years.It was quite a revelation to see the film again in the wondrous 2005 DVD restoration with its sound spatialised for stereo equipment. I saw the colours and the detail and heard the original English dialogue for the first time. The film has acquired a lot of new qualities to my eyes and ears during that viewing - even though the Mohawks were still the blood-thirsty bastards I remembered. I will try to name a few reasons for loving that film.THE RESTORATION AND PHOTOGRAPHY: The restorers worked from a well preserved early interpositive that they cleaned up electronically. Although the results can't compare with the wonders of the expensive ultra-resolution process where all three colour layers of Technicolor are realigned electronically, the image is still for the most part stunning and showing very little misregistration. The day-for-night scenes may be a little wanting in the contrast department, but, all in all, the DVD shows the viewer examples of what made Technicolor such a fascinating novelty. The director of photography takes loving care in giving the viewer his money's worth by showing landscapes, sunrises, sunsets, high noon, cloudy skies, clear skies, forest trails, interiors, thunderstorms, moonlight and candlelight in a way that black and white photography could only suggest. And everything gives the illusion of having been shot on location and mostly outdoors even when logic dictates that this is impossible.THE HISTORICAL INTEREST: There are very few films showing the reality (and the horror) of the Revolutionary War and its impact on frontier people. This film is a magnificent reconstruction. The Black servant Daisy and the good Indian Blue Back may be given short shrift all through the film but they are counted among the characters who proudly salute the new flag of the United States in the final scene when Gil says to his wife that there is still "a heap of work to do" to make this a real country. I also liked Alfred Newman using "Country Gardens" as a musical theme representing the gentility of the lifestyle – and the home country - the pioneers left behind.THE MUSIC: Alfred Newman is a rustic melodist but a very sophisticated musicologist and orchestrator. His music, while never calling attention to itself, does a wonderful job of underlining the numerous suspense scenes with intelligent commentary that has nothing to do with today's "fear music", which is all about percussion, electronic effects and high noise level. His work gives the film its soul through its drama, comedy, suspense and pathos.THE ACTORS: Henry Fonda – perfectly cast (his family actually founded the village of Fonda on the Mohawk River) - gives one of the best speeches of his career. Claudette Colbert, whom it can be suspected was offered the part for her box-office appeal and as a consolation prize for not doing "Gone With The Wind", renounces all mannerisms and compensates for bad casting by acting in a purely visceral and physical way. She succeeds in portraying a subservient and modest wife – which is quite a stretch for her. Edna May Oliver is also given a meaty part of a woman of courage and expression, which she manages to underplay and make real. All the other John Ford regulars (with special kudos to Ward Bond)are equally memorable in making the sometimes quirky and era-specific characters come to life.For all those reasons, this is a film worth preserving and seeing over and over again when one wants to get in touch with the real spirit of the American Revolution, the sacrifices it cost and what it was supposed to accomplish.