Cinema: The Last of the Mohicans

The Last of the Mohicans (Reliance). During the siege of Fort William Henry on Lake George by the French and Hurons under Montcalm (1757), two daughters of the British commander, Alice (Binnie Barnes) and Cora Munro (Heather Angel) set out from Albany for the Fort.

What happens in the woods and rivers during the journey, in the fort during the siege, and in the Huron camp after the fort has fallen, is a complicated triangular contest for life & death between three groups, representing three irreconcilable loyalties. Major Duncan Heyward (Henry Wilcoxon) and Colonel Munro are trying to beat the French; Magua (Bruce Cabot), renegade Huron scout, is trying to get himself a paleface squaw; Hawkeye (Randolph Scott), third-party Colonial, is trying to keep Heyward’s Redcoat notions of wood-warfare from destroying all of them. Randolph Scott walks away with the picture and, in the end, with the affections of Alice. He confounds Magua’s ambush in the woods, eludes him in a canoe chase, heads a mutiny of Colonials in the fort, and finally beats Heyward at a shooting contest for the privilege of dying at a Huron torture stake in place of Alice. He is suffering horribly when rescued.

A danger of James Fenimore Cooper’s works as cinema material is that, without his sombre prose (admired by Maxim Gorki and imitated by Joseph Conrad) they generally boil down into an antique kind of penny-dreadful. Scenarists Philip Dunne, John Balderston, Paul Perez, and Daniel Moore worked in shifts for more than a year to keep this from happening to The Lasf of the Mohicans. Net result is an intelligent and exciting version of a story, which, properly loaded with physical action, keeps the imprint of literature.