With the increasing dangers of another major bloodletting about to occur twenty-two years after the Armistice was signed,a still Depression and myopic saturated United States started becoming aware of the new,fiercer agressors on the world scene. Hollywood not wanting to lose any foreign revenue had tiptoed around Japanese and Italian invasions of China and Ethiopia respectively,and I believe made only one film about the Spanish Civil War "Blockade" starring Henry Fonda. With September 1,1939 and the Hitlerian invasion and conquest of Poland things started to change. Warner Bros."The Sea Hawk" and this film and a host of Bs Cs and what were they thinking film productions started praising up the English for both commercial and political reasons a world spanning empire and the need/use for it as a potential ally in an increasingly dangerous world. So in "NorthWest Passage" the film there is a spurt of why the American Revolution occurred early on,and a brawl between Yank and Limey before the expedition gets fully underway,mostly it's an alliance of equals, united in a common purpose: to defeat the French and annihilate their Indian allies. The cleaned up massacre at the Abenaki village hides the fact like hundreds of other films contemporary and later,that not just fighting men were killed,everybody who didn't escape became victims. Neither the English nor the colonial Americans had any view to sharing the land so the Indian Wars east of the Mississippi contrary to popular belief (the feathered horseman circling the wagons or posed menacingly on the horizon)were far more bloodier than those in the American West.
The film is preparing the American public for the time when they would have to be drawn into the struggle,the cinematic labors of the films grunts would mirror the coming travails of actual GIs in Europe and the Pacific with all classes and races involved. Spencer Tracy for better or worse would become the role model for 2nd lieutenants,Robert Young the post war reflection of a return to normalcy,and Walter Brennan the filmic ancestor of a Jerry Springer panel member.
The film is preparing the American public for the time when they would have to be drawn into the struggle,the cinematic labors of the films grunts would mirror the coming travails of actual GIs in Europe and the Pacific with all classes and races involved. Spencer Tracy for better or worse would become the role model for 2nd lieutenants,Robert Young the post war reflection of a return to normalcy,and Walter Brennan the filmic ancestor of a Jerry Springer panel member.