Foreign News: RED INDIANS

Like millions of Russian readers, Joe Stalin has long been an admirer of Uncas, Chingachgook and the other Indian characters who stalk and skulk through the works of Novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Shown here, glaring in stubborn defiance at two agents of U.S. imperialism, are some new Red Indians designed to catch the fancy of Critic Stalin. They are Russian versions of Cheyenne Chiefs Dull Knife and Wild Hog, the heroes of U.S. Communist Howard Fast’s historical novel The Last Frontier, a fervently sympathetic tale of the doomed efforts of a Cheyenne tribe to escape an Oklahoma reservation in 1878. In dramatizing The Last Frontier, says a Soviet release accompanying this picture, “Producers Alexander Plotnikov and Vladimir Kabachenko . . . have succeeded admirably in conveying the revolutionary pathos which permeates Fast’s novel. Their play, like the novel, exposes the theories of race superiority which reactionaries now use to justify the imperialist expansion of the U.S.”