Northwest Passage, also billed as Northwest Passage , is a 1940 American Western film in Technicolor, directed by King Vidor. It stars Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan and Ruth Hussey. The film is set in 1759, and tells a partly fictionalized version of the real-life St. Francis Raid by Rogers' Rangers, led by Robert Rogers on the primarily Abenaki village of St. Francis, in modern-day Canada. The screenplay, by Laurence Stallings and Talbot Jennings, is based on the 1937 historical novel Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts.