The Last of the Mohicans

Michael Mann puts a white hunter raised by a Mohican family on the road with a British officer’s daughters during the war for North America. The novel is not really the source. The credits name both James Fenimore Cooper’s book and Philip Dunne’s screenplay for the 1936 film; Mann found that picture unwatchable but thought Dunne’s script “wonderful”. It was Dunne, not Cooper, who turned Hawkeye into a romantic lead. Daniel Day-Lewis and Mann trained for weeks with US Army Special Forces instructors on period weapons, fire making and hunting. Set in upstate New York, it was shot in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains. Russell Means, who plays Chingachgook, was acting for the first time and pressed for the pay and conditions of Native American extras. It won the Academy Award for sound in 1993. Which cut you open changes the ending: the 1999 Director’s Expanded Edition adds an explanatory speech for Chingachgook at the close; the 2010 Director’s Definitive Cut removes it. Mann said the themes “don’t need to be speechified, it’s implicit”, and calls that last cut the best. A good fit if you know the version matters and want the ending without that speech. Not for viewers who will mind the centre being the white adopted son rather than Chingachgook and Uncas.