The Last of the Mohicans

Cooper’s long, digressive novel is stripped to a pursuit, and most of what remains is required. The Cameron cabin is needed twice: first as the frontier household at peace, then burned, so that the militia’s demand to go home has a body under it. The fort’s politics, Webb’s promise and Munro’s refusal to release the colonials, are required, since they make Hawkeye’s arrest and put him inside the fort when it falls. Magua’s grievance, told before Montcalm and again in the village, keeps the last act from being revenge alone. What gives is the exposition the fort carries in speeches, which state what the cabin has shown, and Heyward’s turn from rival to sacrifice, hurried, its middle missing.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: on a frontier where two empires wage their war, the people who live there, settler families, the colonial militia and the nations allied to either crown, are the war’s fuel and are spent without account, and the empires’ code of honour, displayed in the parley and the terms of surrender, is a form that covers the killing it permits. The film shows this in image as much as in word: the burned cabin, the column cut down in a meadow after its colours were honoured. Magua is its sharpest instrument, a father whose children are dead and whose people’s land is taken, speaking a counter-history the officers cannot hear, and the film lets it stand unanswered. Held below the gate because the disclosure is given over to the romance: the Mohicans stand at the edge of their own story, Uncas almost without speech, and a people’s vanishing is felt as elegy more than understood.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Elevation comes often and high. The opening run through the forest, three men at full stride under the trees, sets the register before a word is spoken. The night bombardment of the fort, mortar fire falling in long arcs, has a dreadful beauty; the massacre on the march is terror staged across a whole meadow. The falls give the grandest image of the romance, a promise shouted over the water and a leap into the white. Heyward’s death at the stake, ended by one shot from far off, is the coldest height. Then the ridge, the most sustained summit, carried under the main theme. Held below the top because some of the height is lent by the score, and the romance’s elevation is at times a poster’s rather than a transport.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The myth is built and bears load. The film carries the founding American story Cooper made: the natural man who stands between two peoples, the wilderness as the place where a nation is born, the last of a race passing out of the land. The adoption is structural: Hawkeye is a white man raised as Chingachgook’s son, and the last image sets the old father, the adopted son and the English woman on a ridge looking west, so that the end of the Mohican line and the making of a new American couple are one event. Chingachgook’s elegy, spoken over a world that is ending, completes the structure rather than glossing it. Held below the gate because the myth is inherited whole from Cooper and the film of 1936, and because the film mourns the vanished people and celebrates the couple who inherit the land without seeing that the two pull apart.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The departure is real in manner and slight in stake. Mann turned a romance of the nineteenth century, filmed several times before, into a fast, physical, near-wordless action film, with a researched particularity of weapons, dress and fieldcraft (the long rifle loaded at a run, the tomahawk, the fighting in the woods) that the frontier picture had not had. He moved the romance from Uncas and Cora to Hawkeye and Cora, and gave Uncas and Alice a love conducted almost without words. That is a strong refashioning of a source. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake: the wager was placed on a proven path, a star, a famous book and a costume epic, two years after a revisionist frontier epic had triumphed with audiences and the Academy. The film swerves within the studio epic rather than from it, and the departure cost little.

Score: 7.0 / 10

In the last act the form is the knowledge. The ridge sequence, carried by motion, landscape and music with almost no speech, knows that the losses on the frontier are beyond what anyone in the film could say: put into dialogue, the deaths of Uncas and Alice would become explanation, and the film would stop knowing what it knows. The same holds for the wordless love of Uncas and Alice, told in glances across the action, and for the opening hunt, which states the film’s physics before its plot. Elsewhere the form is more container than instrument. The fort and the village carry their meaning in speeches a play could carry, and the romance of Hawkeye and Cora is told in the conventional grammar of the studio love story, close shots and a swelling theme.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Evidence over thirty-four years: the film has been returned to widely and continuously, and the return is wide more than deep. It is watched again for its making, its set pieces, its score and its performances, Day-Lewis’s physical command and Studi’s Magua, and those reward return as craft does. Critical re-examination has been real and narrow: its place in the line of Cooper adaptations, its representation of the native nations, its standing in Mann’s work, the dispute over his later versions. The romance yields little on a second viewing that it did not give on the first, and the political matter, Magua’s grievance and the empires’ code, is suggestive more than inexhaustible. The deepest seam is formal, the composition of the last act.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1990s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of how the historical action epic could move: period combat filmed at speed and in depth, the physical labour of the frontier made visible, and a climax built from running, landscape and music without dialogue. That is real, and not small. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the historical battle epics of the following years share its ambition and its manner of period combat, Braveheart (1995) the nearest, and that likeness is credited at a discount, as the likeliest line of its reach, since descent cannot be shown; its music has been endlessly reused; and its director’s influence on the decade rests more on his films of the city, Heat (1995) among them. Fame is presence, not pressure, and is not counted here.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Thirty-four years of survival read high on the desk’s step, and presence has been wide and continuous: broadcast, every home format, the score in concert and in use. Two charges hold the figure. The first is replacement: Mann reworked the film for home video, in an expanded version of 1999 and a version of 2010 he called definitive, changing dialogue, sound and the placement of music, so that the film as released has had to compete with its revisions; the theatrical cut survives complete, and the charge is a tenth. The second is a surface partly fixed to its moment: the glossed romance, the hair and the lighting of the love scenes carry the early 1990s. The form, a pursuit through a landscape, has not dated.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in the action. Dante Spinotti’s photography of forest, falls and ridge; the cutting of the ambush and the massacre, which keeps space legible across chaos; the sound of rifles, mortar and water, recorded and mixed with force. Day-Lewis moves as a man who has lived in the woods; Studi’s Magua carries the film’s intelligence in a still face; Means gives the elegy its weight. The costs fall where they matter. The score, divided between two composers, is magnificent in its themes and generic in its connective cues. Much of the dialogue is stiff, and Stowe and Waddington are given lines more than people. The love scenes use the lighting and swelling music of the studio romance, and Mann’s own later versions show that he found the released mix and dialogue unfinished.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the love scene on the fort’s rampart, lit in amber and scored as romance, and the massacre on the march, filmed as chaos and slaughter. One law governs both: every feeling in the film is played at full pitch and in the body, so that love is declared at a shout over a waterfall and death comes at a run. The pursuit binds the whole, and the wordless last act completes the wordless hunt of the first, so the film begins and ends in the same physics. The strain is in the middle register: the fort’s politics are spoken in a measured, expository manner that belongs to another kind of film, and the long plea in the Huron village, with Heyward translating, slows into theatre.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Several orders are held in one structure: two empires at war and their codes; the colonial militia and the question of whose war it is; three native nations and their alliances; a family, Munro and his daughters, and an adopted family, Chingachgook and his two sons; love; the natural order of forest and river; and the historical passing of a people. They are integrated rather than listed, because the pursuit carries them all: the empires’ war burns the cabin, the cabin sends the militia home, the arrest puts Hawkeye inside the fort when it falls, the fall makes Magua’s revenge, and the revenge ends the Mohican line. What holds the axis is the scale of an action romance: labour, faith and the inner life of the native characters are present as surfaces, and the state is seen in its officers rather than held.

Score: 7.2 / 10