Wesley Studi : Magua

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La critique de James Berardinelli

There is so little wrong with this film that I'll get the incidental negatives out of the way first. The introductory moments are somewhat confusing, and it takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to get the characters and situations straight. Madeleine Stowe's British accent is of the "now-you-hear-it, now-you-don't" variety, although her performance pretty much makes up for this inconsistency. Finally, the photography surrounding the waterfall is unconvincing. Other than that, The Last of the Mohicans is virtually flawless.

Cinematography and musical score combine in a breathtaking mosaic. Historical accuracy has been preserved (even if the movie takes liberties with James Fenimore Cooper's story).The battle scenes are easily the best choreographed since Glory -- there's so much going on that one viewing isn't enough to pick up on everything.

From beginning to end, there isn't a weak performance. As the bare-chested central character, a native-raised white man named Hawkeye, Daniel Day-Lewis shines, bringing acting acumen to the role of romantic adventure hero. Madeleine Stowe, Richard Dreyfuss' girlfriend in Stakeout, is equally appealing as Hawkeye's upper-class British love interest. The major characters are fully fleshed-out, and there's more audience empathy for the minor characters here than the protagonists in many other films. As is common in a realistic depiction of a war, very little is absolutely good or evil.

Finally, there's the story, which, while not all that complex, is of epic nature -- big, bold, and gloriously sweeping. It's about the love of Hawkeye, the adopted Mohican, and Cora, the daughter of a British commander stationed in America during the mid-1700s. War and tragedy swirl around them as they struggle to find their own kind of private solace. Bold andstirring with impeccable production values, The Last of the Mohicans is a memorable motion picture adventure, and one of the best films of the year.

Impressive, But Overlooked Masterpiece From 1992

Author: tfrizzell from United States
15 September 2000

"The Last of the Mohicans" is a very good film that was basically ignored by everyone in 1992. Based on James Fenimore Cooper's novel of the same name, the movie is impressive in every way imaginable. Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe are best in the ensemble cast. Michael Mann's direction has rarely been better. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

La critique de Roger Ebert
September 25, 1992  

Much has been made about how authentic "The Last of the Mohicans" is, about how the cast learned wilderness survival skills and how every bow, arrow, canoe and moccasin was constructed according to the ancient ways. That's the kind of publicity Cecil B. DeMille used to churn out, as if he had created a brand new world from scratch, like God.

I am the first to confess I know little about how people really lived in the first decades of the European settlement of North America, but while I was watching "The Last of the Mohicans," I was haunted by memories of another movie -- "Black Robe" (1991), set in the earliest days of the French settlement of Quebec. This was a long and depressing film by Bruce Beresford, who went to great pains to recreate the actual living conditions in North America at the time of his story: the architectural details of the Indian dwellings, their methods of hunting and food procurement, the way they used absolute cooperation and trust of each other as a weapon against the deadly climate.

"Black Robe" did not involve me in its story, but its visual picture of life in those days has stayed with me. Watching "The Last of the Mohicans," I could not get it out of my mind. As the handsome frontiersman Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) decides whether to join the troops being raised by the British to fight the French, as he falls in love with the daughter of a British officer (Madeleine Stowe in a fetching performance), as he sides with the Mohicans who have adopted him and they face the threat of the Huron tribe which opposes them, I was acutely conscious of the Saturday matinee traditions being exploited.

I was also aware that I was enjoying the movie more than "Black Robe." Michael Mann, who directed "The Last of the Mohicans," says that his first conscious movie memory was of the 1936 film version of the same story, starring Randolph Scott, and indeed Philip Dunne's screenplay for that movie is cited as a source for this one.It is also inspired, of course, by the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, whose frontier fantasies were completely demolished in an hilarious essay by Mark Twain, who noted that whenever the plot required a twig to be stepped on, a Cooper character was able to find a twig and step on it, no matter what the difficulty.

Mann's film is quite an improvement on Cooper's all but unreadable book, and a worthy successor to the Randolph Scott version. In Daniel Day-Lewis he has found the right actor to play Hawkeye, even though no other role ever played by Day-Lewis ("My Left Foot", "A Room with a View", "My Beautiful Laundrette" ") would remotely suggest that. There are just enough historical and political details; the movie touches quickly on the fine points of British-French-Indian-settler conflicts, so that they can get on to the story we're really interested in, about the hero who wins the heart of the girl."The Last of the Mohicans" is not as authentic and uncompromised as it claims to be -- more of a matinee fantasy than it wants to admit -- but it is probably more entertaining as a result.

The scenes of forest-fighting follow all the usual Hollywood rules: the hero rarely misses, and the villains rarely hit anyone needed later in the story. Remembering the sickening thuds of weapon against bone in "Black Robe," I realized I was looking at a sanitized entertainment, but I didn't care.I was also not much disturbed by the movie's pre-digested history (how many people, even after seeing this movie, could correctly report that the French and Indian Wars were not between the French and the Indians?).

We live in an age of pop images, in which these are the parts that get remembered: Hawkeye, a white man, adopted by Indians, standing between the two civilizations at a time when the Indians were richer and more powerful than the settlers; his decision to escort the British officer's daughter and her sister to the fort where their father awaits them; their adventures along the way, leading to death, bloodshed, and a stirring final shot of the couple gazing out toward the horizon -- toward all those millions of unspoiled square miles to be turned into shopping malls by the issue of their loins.

The ultimate early Western romance.

Author: Al (ajchappell) from London, England
16 November 2004

This film, for reasons that are not completely obvious to me, struck a chord. It was in part the amazing location shots, partly the characters, partly the music and the action sequences.

As for the (relatively) under-developed romance between the hero and heroine - all I can say is that the line that Hawkeye delivers when Cora Munro challenges this rough colonial who has the temerity to gaze upon her (a colonel's daughter) and says (essentially): 'Who are you looking at?' Hawkeye answers: 'You, Ma'am. I'm looking at you.' Priceless.

Interestingly, archeologists have recently excavated the site of Fort William Henry and discovered many interesting things, none of which contradict the events described by Fenimore Cooper. The attack on the defeated column in the woods also appears to be historically accurate.This film, though imperfect, ranks with me as one of the best action movies of all time.