If nothing else, I have to admit that Lex Barker looks great in buckskin. He makes for a fine Deerslayer. Always clean shaven, well-coiffed and spick and span. It may not seem all that authentic considering the period and the circumstances but that is how America liked its rugged heroes back in the 1950s. A decade later and he would have looked like a grizzled tramp. The Deerslayer was the last novel in Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales relaying the adventures of the Deerslayer aka Natto Bumppo but it was actually a prequel to the series of books. For what it is worth, D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the most beautiful and perfect books in the world". I read the illustrated comic book years back and that was pretty good too! The movie plot is vaguely in the same neighborhood as the book but with a lot of changes. One of the writers was none other than Dalton Trumbo - uncredited of course because he was being blacklisted. Kurt Neumann is the director - he was mainly a B film director with three of the Weissmuller RKO Tarzan films to his credit (or discredit depending) as well as one of the Lex Barker Tarzan films. It is the film after this that he is most famous for - The Fly with Vincent Price.

 

It takes place in the 1740s in upstate New York (though shot in Sierra Nevada) with the settlers slowly pushing west. Albany is the big city. The Deerslayer and his Mohican friend Chingachgook (Carlos Rivas) are out hunting when they cross paths with the dreaded Huron tribe - deadly enemy of the Mohicans. They also come across Harry March (Forest Tucker) who is escaping from a war party. He is on his way up the river to where a friend has built a tiny fort on top of a flat river boat with a cannon on top. This is Old Tom (Jay Flippen) who lives far away from civilization with his two grown up daughter (Cathy O'Donnell - They Live By Night - and Rita Moreno - four years before West Side Story and 64 years before West Side Story).


Deerslayer can't figure out why the Huron are so far outside their territory and why they are attacking the fort, He discovers why. Scalps. Indian scalps went for $100 each in Albany and Old Tom has been collecting them - for the money and because they did the same to his wife many years previously. He is filled with hatred and Harry is in it with him. I enjoy this period of movies - the wilderness, the one-shot musket, the Indians, canoes and living by your wits. The Native Americans actually are treated ok here though their fighting skills are questionable - where are their arrows - they could have made short shrift of the white folks with them. They want their scalps back because their dead cannot move on. The bad guys are really the two white men. There are plenty of racial epithets thrown around, but it fits the personalities of the two men while Deerslayer and Chingachgook roll their eyes at these two idiots. Good adventure. Lex Barker is a natural for this sort of thing though he would soon be taking his good looks over to Europe for most of his career where he starred in a ton of adventure and spy films. One series of films he was in was based on the German Karl May Westerns in which he again teamed up with a Native American named Winnetou.