The Last of the Mohicans (no 83)

by Allan Fish

(USA 1920 71m) DVD1

The curse of the red men

p  Maurice Tourneur  d  Maurice Tourneur, Clarence Brown (uncredited)  w  Robert Dillon  novel  James Fenimore Cooper  ph  Philippe R.DuBois, Charles Van Enger  m  R.J.Miller (1993 reissue)  art  Fluyd Mueller, Ben Carré  cos  Ben Carré

Wallace Beery (Magua), Harry Lorraine (Hawkeye), Barbara Bedford (Cora Munro), Alan Roscoe (Uncas), Lillian Hall (Alice Munro), Henry Woodward (Major Heyward), James Gordon (Colonel Munro), Theodore Lorch (Chingachgook), Boris Karloff (Indian),

There have been many versions of Cooper’s classic tale since the dawn of sound and yet somehow none of them come close to the power of this silent masterwork.  One particularly recalls the 1936 version with Randolph Scott as Hawkeye and Bruce Cabot in another typically nasty portrayal as the villainous Magua, while I can still recall watching the Michael Mann 1992 effort in my local cinema with a sense of disbelief.  Not at the film necessarily, which was serviceable enough, but in the way the plot had been put into a blender until it bore no relation to the original novel whatsoever, even killing off the wrong sister and turning said wrong’s sister’s romantic aspirations towards Hawkeye, not the noble Uncas.  For all its old school captions of ‘dark hair’, ‘yellow hair’ and ‘red men’, this 1920 classic was more faithful and not half so long drawn out.

            Set in 1757 at the heart of the Anglo-French Seven Years War, it follows the fates of sisters Cora and Alice Munro.  They are taken from their refuge at Fort Edward to go to their father at Fort William Henry, but they are unknowingly led into a trap by the treacherous Indian scout Magua, as the young women are not aware of their father’s being under siege and the presence of a horde of Hurons, filled with firewater to hate the British.  Magua sets about his evil plans and the women seem at his mercy, but they are briefly rescued by the noble Mohican Indian Uncas, who falls in love with Cora, his father Chingachgook, and trapper Hawkeye.  Cora is forced to go with Magua to save her younger sister the same fate, but then Cora threatens to throw herself into a towering ravine.  Can Uncas and Hawkeye rescue her in time?

            Of course anyone who has read the novel will be able to answer that one, and perhaps that very downbeat ending is what makes it such a hard sell for cinema audiences to swallow, who like their adventure films to end happily and the original book be hanged.  To his credit, Tourneur pulls few punches – Brown stepped in to direct for a few weeks while Tourneur recovered from an injury, but the film is very much Tourneur’s vision – and it also refuses to downplay the romance of Uncas and Cora, a romance whose miscegenation would hardly have appealed to the hard right American heartland.  For a 1920 film it might be argued that it’s too static, the camera indeed not moving at all apart from one sequence, the evacuation of Fort William Henry prior to Magua’s attack.  Of course, the mountainous terrain made the rails necessary for tracking and zoom shots impossible, but Tourneur displays more than adequate mastery of mise-en-scene and editing to keep his picture moving.  He’s helped immeasurably by the gorgeous photography of Van Enger and DuBois, and it remains probably the first American film to rival the work of great Scandinavian DP Julius Jaenzon in capturing the vast beauty of the great outdoors.  The performances, though very much old school, are perfectly in keeping, with Bedford a perfectly melancholy Cora, Roscoe a daring Uncas and an especially memorable, scenery-chewing baddie from a budding Wallace Beery, a role that set him up in a career of supporting turns as rogues that kept him through the silent era.  Nowadays, Tourneur is primarily remembered as the father of fellow master Jacques Tourneur, but he remains sadly overlooked – check out his lovely 1918 version of The Blue Bird and his 1922 Lorna Doone for other examples of his craft.  The gorgeous restored George Eastman House print on Region 1 DVD is now deleted and has been going for exorbitant sums on ebay and amazon marketplace, but be diligent and you’ll find a copy and I promise you, you won’t be disappointed.