Word: manns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIRECTOR: MICHAEL MANN...
WRITERS: MICHAEL MANN AND CHRISTOPHER CROWE...
Oops. Wrong boring American classic. But Longfellow's lines are appropriate nevertheless to a consideration of Michael Mann's ravishing realization of The Last of the Mohicans. From its first images of a deer hunt to its last shots of hero and heroine gazing westward toward mist-shrouded mountains, the film's sensuous evocations of an Arcadian wilderness draw us into a remote realm -- just as the need to penetrate the majesty and mystery of that landscape draws its characters irresistibly on to fates ennobling and tragic...
...Director Mann says his first potent movie memory is of the 1936 screen adaptation of the book (with Randolph Scott). He has gone farther than the older picture did in straightening and strengthening the plot -- about a besieged fort, the ill-timed attempt of the commandant's daughter to join her father there and the anarchy that follows his surrender. Even Magua, the treacherous Indian villain of the piece, played with deadly relish by Wes Studi, is given a good motive for his dastardliness, the dignity of his otherness and even allowed a nanosecond of pity...
...pressure instead of exploding into more predictable action. Conversely, Madeleine Stowe, playing the commandant's elder daughter, for whom earlier versions of Hawkeye have had only a distant admiration, invests her character with a sureness about her needs and a moral courage that is very much up to date. Mann rewards them with actual sexual contact, quietly yet fiercely staged, that is a wonderful, even startling, break with tradition...