“My Indian friends didn't speak to me for a while,” King Vidor admitted, after the release of what must be the single most ferocious pre-World War II American film. More than any of his films, Northwest Passage reveals how Vidor's admiration of vitality could slide into a savage Social Darwinism. In his defense, what was actually made is only half the film he planned from Kenneth Roberts' epic of the eighteenth century French and Indian Wars. Alarmed by low water levels at the difficult Idaho locations, Vidor started shooting with an incomplete script. MGM then cut the story off at midpoint (and assigned another director-Jack Conway-to shoot a perfunctory ending). As the film exists, Spencer Tracy's brutally heroic Major Robert Rogers stands unqualified by the disintegration central to the never-filmed second half. (“I guess they feared audiences of that time wouldn't accept that,” commented Vidor later.) It's part of a prewar cycle of Hollywood revivals of the Indian wars in Technicolor (Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk, De Mille's North-West Mounted Police), and the lush wilderness makes a spectacular and uncompromising backdrop. True antagonists for Harvard drop-out and cartographer Robert Young, his cohort Walter Brennan, and the rest of Rogers' Rangers are less the French and the Indians than fatigue, rage, insubordination, and starvation.