One more version of the oft-filmed LAST OF THE MOHICANS, this one was shot in color and has what might be described as an ‘interesting’ cast. The big surprise, perhaps, is the Jon Hall does not play the scout Hawkeye, though at about the same time he attempted to make the changeover from sarong-star, most often opposite Dorothy Lamour, into a western hero, having played the legendary scout Kit Carson in a relatively big budget production from Edward Small. Instead, he’s Duncan, the up-tight British officer who vies with Hawkeye during the French and Indian war. Michael O’Shea plays Hawkeye, and what’s most intriguing about the film is that he does it as a character role, coming much closer to the “Natty Bumppo” of James Fenimore Cooper’s books than is usually the case with Hollywood, where Hawkeye almost invariably is turned into a conventional hero figure, tall, dark and handsome. The pace is sometimes sluggish, though the film remains of interest in terms of the way in which it sometimes closely follows and at other moments departs from the source. Most offbeat of all is the casting of Buster Crabbe, usually a hero of outer space (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers) or the old west (Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp in B movies) as the evil Magua, a Huron who betrays Alice and Cora Munro – certainly the biggest stretch of Crabbe’s career.