Reviews

Why does this movie affect people so? A lot of reviewers have commented on how well-made it is, how good the music is, how realistic the battle scenes. Others point out that the acting (especially from Day-Lewis and Wes Studi) is outstanding. And of course, "it has everything": action, romance, war, even a kind of proto-Western.

These factors are surely important. Yet I believe there is one more factor that tips the balance from "well-made film" to "classic": Last of the Mohicans is simply the best film ever made about the American Revolution.

Ah, but you say, it isn't about the American Revolution, it's set in the French and Indian Wars, 20 years before the start of the Revolution. True enough. It isn't set in the Revolution, but it is about it. To be exact, it's about the birth of America as a distinctive nation.

This theme is carried by the friction between the settlers and the British soldiers, by the existence of the farmers along the Hudson River frontier who are seeking an independent life after their term in indentured servitude, by the way the great powers of Europe squabble over a continent that isn't theirs (shades of the Monroe doctrine), by the go-where-we-please attitude of men like Nathaniel Poe, and lastly by the Indians.

It must be remembered how much the European settlers learned from the Indians - and one important thing they learned is how to fight on American terrain with limited ammunition against massed forces. In the American Revolution, bluecoats bedeviled the redcoats by shooting from behind trees and boulders, by ducking and running instead of fighting mano a mano. We see this lesson more than once in Last of the Mohicans.

So if we take the movie to be a portrayal of how a combination of European and Native cultures, shaped by the frontier, and a passionate desire to live by one's own judgment beholden to no one created a new human type, then we can also see how another title for the film, just as apt as Last of the Mohicans, would have been First of the Americans.

I saw this movie when I was perhaps 6 or 7 and have only seen bits of it on TV since, but I remember it all too well. A Nazi physician is trying to revive frozen high-ranking Germans, but they all come out brain-damaged. He needs a healthy brain to experiment on. A depraved assistant takes it upon himself to sic one of the brain-damaged revivees upon a houseguest, a college chum of the physician's unknowing daughter. This young lady is made out to be attractive, bright with a full head of hair.

When she wakes up her head has been chopped off and hooked up to life-support tubing. Her hair (and scalp and skull) have been replaced by a transparent dome so that her brain is visible. She can only speak in a whisper (a bit of artistic license there). The make-up on her face suggests a concentration-camp victim and her agony and helplessness are palpable. She is hectored by the physician trying to get her to send nerve impulses to some severed arms mounted on a wall.

Enough. I understand that horror movies require innocent people to suffer, but at least up until Night of the Living Dead, the suffering was largely off-screen or was kept brief. This film tortures its victim unspeakably. There is no hope for her.

The only things I can say to the movie's credit are that the atmosphere is well evoked and that it plays almost exactly like one of those old "Tales from the Crypt" EC comics from the 1950s. Of course, they were sadistic, too. Don't let a child (i.e. anyone under the age of 70) see this movie; it could damage them for life.