Professor Me k and Kenneth Roberts may not agree on the history of the westward movement, but they can both make it mighty interesting. Harvard's lecture-hall Leatherstocking brings it to life with words alone, but in "Northwest Passage," now at Loew's State and Orpheum, Kenneth Roberts has the help of Technicolor, gorgeous location scenes, Spencer Tracy, and Robert Young. Tracy plays the superman of frontier tall tales, Major Rogers of Rogers' Rangers, who performs stupendous feats of leadership on a handful of parched corn a day. It is a delight and a pleasure to see him take an overwritten part like this and make it convincing. Robert Young fares less well as a romantic hero, a Harvard man who ran away from college to paint Indians, and who can make fifteen miles a day with Rogers' Rangers even though his stomach is plugged with a bullet. But even so, it's a fascinating journey with the Rangers, watching them form a human chain across the rapids, and burn and slaughter a village of Indians. Many of the outdoor shots are breathtaking in their Technicolored beauty, and the art of Spencer Tracy brings a credible human being into eventful, and thrilling, contact with the wilderness.