Call it cowardly or unprofessional, but one of the joys of running this blog is that I don't necessarily have to give difficult movies ratings if I don't want to. If I was getting paid to write a review, then I would have to bite the bullet and give the prescribed film a score. But not so here. I refuse to give King Vidor's Northwest Passage an official score. If I was judging the film based solely on its artistic merits, I would probably give it a 7/10. After all, it's a well-made Eastern about a band of proto-American soldiers trying to survive in the wilderness. And to this extent Vidor demonstrates his characteristic brilliance with imagery and scenes involving large groups of people working together towards a common goal: troops pulling heavy canoes up and down the side of a hill; men trekking through endless fly-infested swamps; soldiers building a human chain in order to cross a rampaging river. The problem is that these soldiers experience these hardships before and after gleefully slaughtering a whole village of Native Americans. And make no mistake: the film treats the real-life St. Francis Raid wherein 300 Abenaki men, women, and children were brutally massacred as some kind of triumphant victory. Northwest Passage is one of the most racially repugnant films I've ever seen and its revisionist take on the St. Francis Raid--in the film they make a point to spare the elders, women, and children when in real life they did the exact opposite--is nothing short of nauseating. I refuse to dignify this film with a score.
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