Copyright 1957 by 20th Century-Fox Film Corp. No New York opening. U.S. release: September 1957. U.K. release: 8 December 1957. Australian release: 26 December 1957. Sydney opening at the Palace. 6,868 feet. 76 minutes.SYNOPSIS : Leather-Stocking and his Mohican blood-brother become involved in an embittered settler's one-man war against the Huron Indians.NOTES: Cooper's novel was previously filmed in 1923 and again in 1943.Fox's 86th CinemaScope feature and the first from the home office that failed to secure a New York opening. Fox's U.K. office were so ashamed of this low-budget offering that they managed to successfully pass it off as a Regal Film.COMMENT: Disappointing. True, Neumann can use the CinemaScope screen effectively at times, but his good intentions are undermined both by his over-talkative script with its often unintentionally risible lines and by his roster of distinctly second-string players. True, all the players have proved themselves capable of much better things, but oddly enough the only person to give a halfway decent performance here is Forrest Tucker, the runt of the acting litter. Despite a fair amount of location lensing, Neumann's minuscule budget imposes such production limitations that most viewers are likely to be bored stiff. Neumann has tried to spark up interest by accenting violence and brutality but this stratagem only further lessens this Deerslayer's already rather limited appeal.

Judging from other reviews this must be a quite racist movie, when in fact it isn't.First of all the Native Americans, here represented by the Hurons, do not carry the main conflict. In fact they are quite civilized, for they agree to let their sworn enemy, Hutter, go free in return for the scalps of the people Hutter has killed.The actual conflicting parties are Old Hutter and Harry March on the one side and mainly Deerslayer and Chingachook on the other. The main mystery for Deerslayer to solve - and it is no McGuffin - is why the Hurons are attacking and it really is something despicable and dark: Old Hutter has been hunting for Native Americans and with the help of Harry March been selling their scalps. Old Hutter does it to revenge his wife and March is in it for the money, which in fact will bring Deerslayer and Chingachook in pretty bad trouble. Something that Deerslayer decidedly is horrified by. Even though one might argue about the happy ending, it is the movie's merit to explicitly show this horrible practice of putting a price on Native Americans' scalps.

The others contributing to the comments section on this 1957 film seem pre-occupied with the so-called Political Correctness and racism of today. One goes so far as to say that he can't understand how children of the 1950's could accept this as entertainment. Well, let me comment on the last thing first. This film was released in the UK in December, 1957, when I was ten and three quarters years of age. At that time, both myself and all my boyhood pals had recently gone through the Davy Crockett phase and subsequently, any movie set in Colonial America and having plenty of yipping injuns; frontiersmen and flintlock muskets and pistols was bound to be popular with us. In this respect and at that very different time, THE DEERSLAYER was bound to be popular with the juvenile audience it was aimed at. It also had beautiful, warm and sunlit scenery, spendidly photographedin CinemaScope and Color by De Luxe and a memorable score by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter.At the time, I thought this film was marvellous and very exciting, especially the Indian attack on the fort in the middle of the lake. Me and my pals had a new hero in The Deerslayer and incorporated him into our games of cowboys and Indians in which some of us would play the Hurons, mown down mercilessly by the musket fire of the other boys.This may seem very strange now to younger readers of this site who can't remember the 1950's, but this was the way it was then. Throughout our childhood, we had been indoctrinated by the cinema into believing that what would now be considered racist ideas about native Americans were correct. They were represented as "squalling polecats" and "savages" and "heathens", not as people. Just as anonymous targets to be mown down. A hindrance and a thorn in the side of white settlers pushing the frontier Westward.So this film is a product of its time and should not be judged by our modern standards. There had been the very isolated film like BROKEN ARROW, that gave a more accurate and sympathetic view of the American Indian, but for every BROKEN ARROW, there were a dozen films of the calibre of THE DEERSLAYER; THE GUNS OF FORT PETTICOAT and DRAGOON WELLS MASSACRE. I do not think that our ideas as children about Red Indians would have been considered racist in 1957, because we kids had never heard that word at that time. But I like to think that we've all grown up a lot in our knowledge and attitudes since then. After all, I realise now that the Indians were fighting for their land, which was being stolen from them by the whites and fighting to preserve their way of life. They had a right to fight back. Looked at today, THE DEERSLAYER may look corny and racist, but it was filmed in 1957, not 2003. For it's time, then, a rousing Boy's Own adventure that would have been popular with juveniles. Modern boys in the eight to thirteen age bracket, though, probably wouldn't like it.

I've always shared Mark Twain's views on James Fenimore Cooper's writing & would much rather see a decent movie version of any Natty Bumpo story than having to wade through the ponderous verse, & tuned into American Movie Classics tonight to see one of the many movie versions out there about The Deerslayer. Made in 1957, this cut-rate production starring Lex Barker (who played Tarzan a few times before this), Rita Moreno (whom I have never seen this young) & Forrest Tucker (whom I like much better on "F Troop") comes across as something only marginally as good as something you might have seen produced by "The Wonderful World Of Disney." Or maybe by Sid & Marty Krofft, to be seen as the live-action segments on "The Banana Splits."Deerslayer & his faithful Indian companion Chingachgook stumble onto an old trader (Tucker) who asks for their help in protecting a crazy old man & his two daughters from a Huron assault. Well-groomed & stoic throughout, Deerslayer agrees (for some reason) & meets the old man on his floating fort in the middle of the river. The crazy codger hates Indians, & he seems to pamper & flatter his oldest daughter while telling his youngest (played by Moreno) that she's feeble-minded. Deerslayer has suspicions about the whole set-up, but you don't have to be an avid mystery-novel reader to figure out the reasons behind the Huron charge. Barker, constantly posing with his gun & giving those humored looks at the women that George Reeves as Superman always did, plays an android Deerslayer, & the fight scenes are about as exciting as the cliched "Yi yi yi" the Huron holler out when attacking is threatening.I guess this was made for the Saturday-morning-movie crowd, but there's a part of me that can't believe that even children of the 1950s would be taken in by what now seems obvious: the ridiculously stereotyped Indians, the bad, off-the-screen violence poorly done, even the wooden performance by Barker must've been seen as more comic than heroic. Daniel Day-Lewis frantically saying, "Don't worry, I'll find you!" never looked better.