A Film Canon

The first film version of The Last Of The Mohicans is remarkable for refraining from full- blown melodrama or exoticism, despite many scenarios that might lend themselves to it, retaining the calm detachment of Cooper's prose style, as embodied in the impassive, painterly face of its heroine (which makes the prospect of scalping all the more horrific), and epitomised by the central massacre, in which the minutiae of horror (a horse smelling a dying horse, an Indian throwing a child on the ground) are coolly integrated into a high- angled, long-shot panorama worthy of The Birth Of A Nation. This is enhanced by an unusual approach to editing, whereby most interiors give the impression of continguous space, whereas exteriors are often summarised in a single, exquisitely painterly tableau, or series of relatively discontinuous tableaux, culminating with an encounter on a hyperbolic precipice, whose 360-degree vantage point gives each shot a quite different feel. Interestingly, however, Hawkeye's role as interlocutor between Indian and Western cultures is relegated to a duo of cameos bookending the narrative, in which he appears more as a buffoon than the thoughtful boundary rider of the original - although this may merely be a (slightly misguided) attempt to simplify Cooper's occasionally confusing plethora of characters; or, alternatively, to ensure that the characters are sufficiently few for the narrative to be effectively played out in that silhouetted mode endemic to Tourneur's cinema, and which suits the Romantic backdrops perfectly, particularly whenever cave openings are used to frame and deepen the horizon, as with The Blue Bird.