Derek Winnert

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This article was written on 24 Mar 2016, and is filled under Reviews.

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Mohawk * (1956, Scott Brady, Rita Gam, Neville Brand, Ted de Corsia) – Classic Movie Review 3496

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Director Kurt Neumann’s 1956 Western adventure is a soppy, risible, penny-pinching little movie with more accent on love tangles than on gun-slinging action. It pushes its luck by re-using extensive archive footage from the outstanding John Ford movie Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), inviting odorous comparisons. And it hardly helps that Rita Gam, Neville Brand and Ted de Corsia make unlikely Indians.

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Scott Brady stars as Jonathan Adams, a dandified artist who comes out West from Boston to work in a remote army post and paint pictures of Native Americans. Rita Gam plays Onida, the Indian Chief’s young daughter Adams flirts with, along with the storekeeper’s daughter, before he decides to settle down with a Boston woman, Cynthia Stanhope (Lori Nelson), his fiancée newly arrived from the East. But then a vengeful settler sets the Army and the Indian braves against each other and Adams tries to quell the braves who are getting on their high horse.

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This silly nonsense, which might have worked better as a musical, is a losing combination of over-the-top acting, cardboard sets, theatrical handling, re-used footage and under-cooked screenplay (by Maurice Geraghty and Milton Krims). Brady gives a smug, unappealing performance, though admittedly he has an impossible, dislikeable role to play.

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Also in the cast are Neville Brand as Rokhawah, Allison Hayes, John Hoyt, Vera Vague [Barbara Jo Allen] as Aunt Agatha, Mae Clarke, Ted de Corsia as Indian Chief Kowanen, Tommy Cook, Rhys Williams, John Hudson, Michael Granger,James Lilburn and Chabon Jadi.

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Rita Gam – born on 2 April 1927 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as Rita Eleanore Mackay- died on 22 March 2016, aged 88.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3496

Link to home page for more reviews derekwinnert.com

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