1920: (Not Exactly) The Last of the Mohicans

The Last of the Mohicans (1920)
Directed by Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown
57 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White (tinted); Silent

I was surprised by the 1920 silent adventure The Last of the Mochicans. Not so much by directors Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown's visually dynamic depiction of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel about the rescue of sisters kidnapped by Huron warriors during the French and Indian War, but rather by the fact that it was made in 1920 at all. In that year, the U.S. was in the midst of post-war economic troubles, Warren G. Harding won the White House and business-minded Republicans would be back in power after years of Wilsonian idealism, fear of subversion resulted in violence and deportation of suspected communists, the Volstead Act implemented prohibition of alchohol, a reformed Ku Klux Klan gained unprecedented membership, and following the decades-spanning lead of New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Russia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Austria, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Germany—the United States finally extended suffrage to women. With momentous events like these screaming from newspaper headlines why release a remake of a 19th century fable about the dangers of the colonial froniter?

Cora (Barbara Bedford) and Alice (Lilian Hall) Munro are menaced by Magua (Wallace Beery).

Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans is influenced by a true incident that I'd like to see made into a motion picture someday. During the American Revolution, Jemima Boone, daughter of frontiersman Daniel Boone, and two of her friends were kidnapped on the Kentucky River near Boonesborough by Shawnee and Cherokee men. Daniel Boone organized a rescue mission and the party set off after the girls. The Kentuckians ambushed the kidnappers three days later, killing two of them and driving off the rest, and the girls were safely returned home. Cooper’s novel replaces Boone with his pioneer hero creation Natty Bumppo aka Hawkeye, the Kentucky frontier with the woods of colonial New York, Shawnee men with Hurons, and the adventure of Boone’s daughter and her friends with the capture and attempted rescue of two daughters of the commander of Fort William Henry. The book is an adventure story of life on the frontier that tries to sympathetic to the fate of Native Americans while promoting heroic ideas about the American character.

Why make a movie about these things in 1920? Was it because “Indian Pictures” were the most popular and audiences were clamoring for more? Not exactly. Back in 1912 the New York Times had predicted that "Indian Pictures" like Mohicans would soon be passé: “Do you know the Western film and its sister, the Indian film...know, then, that these, the latest fashions, are disappearing” (“Quick Fashion Changes in Moving-Picture Plays,” New York Times, 4 August 1912, SM14). Though Westerns would refute this prediction by becoming the top genre in American movies later in the decade, in 1920 "home-spun” pictures, comedies, and adventure stories starring Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were just as popular. In 1921, a reviewer in the Times mused that audiences might feel compelled to see The Last of the Mohicans “from a bothersome sense of duty—in themselves or their parents” because the book had been regularly taught in elementary school for years. Tourneur and Brown “used the magic of the camera” to turn a history lesson into a suspenseful melodrama, the review assures us, and the fact that they rearrange and even delete details of the book’s narrative is all right because the action-packed movie (especially the final duel on a cliff’s edge) is, after all, fun to watch (“The Screen,” New York Times, 3 January 1921, 22). Hmm...

The "bothersome sense of duty" that the Times review alludes to may have something to do with a startling revelation in the 1890 census: the American frontier was no more. Speaking before a gathering of historians in Chicago in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his thesis: the hardships facing settlers on the froniter was responsible for developing the American character as they knew it, but now, as the recent census had shown, the frontier was gone. Turner’s ideas sent shockwaves through the country—if the frontier was responsible for making Americans what they are (or imagined to be), what will affect the development of the American character now that the froniter was no more? From the perspective of 1920, with the chilling memory of the needless slaughter of World War I subverting former convictions about positivism, the questions that arose from Turner’s thesis resulted in very real fears. More recent thinking has challenged Turner's ideas, but perhaps Tourneur and Brown thought that revisiting the alleged bravery and unflinching heroism of America's fronitier days, through the adventures of Cora Munro (Barbara Bedford), Hawkeye (Harry Lorraine), and Uncas (Albert Roscoe), the last of the Mohicans, would be welcomed by a movie-going public facing uncertainty and radical changes in post-war America.

Hurons on the warpath — not exactly the most convincing looking group are they?.

Incidentally, that Times review also bashes the film’s major flaw: though Tourneur and Brown have taken pains to establish a certain amount of realism in the production, the picture’s authenticity falls apart whenever Magua or any of the other “Indians” appear on the screen—the fact that they're all white actors painted up to look like someone’s idea of a Mohican, Delaware or Huron is painfully obvious. The Times reviewer wonders, “why did Tourneur try to make an Indian out of Wallace Beery?” because it confronts the suspension of disbelief that is required of all cinema viewing. A similar question was recently asked by Brian at Hell on Frisco Bay about the casting of Burt Lancaster as an Apache in Robert Aldrich's Apache (1954). Actors transform themselves into all manner of people from different times, places and events, but some portrayals bring authenticity, if not taste, into question. Wallace Beery as a Huron? Burt Lancaster as an Apache? Come on. One look at any of these paint-jobs and we’re torn right out of the picture and spend the rest of the movie wondering about the seeming lack of wisdom in casting decisions. The 1921 Times review shows that support for screen realism isn’t a symptom of current political correctness either but was, in fact, openly discussed over eighty years ago. The fact that these objections weren't always heeded by filmmakers only brings up another question: why? I’ll keep my eyes open for more clues to that little mystery as the Films of the Year roll by. The Last of the Mohicans was remade at least three more times so there's a chance that some other filmmakers developed Tourneur and Brown’s brilliant visual dynamism yet avoided their film's other shortcomings.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2006 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

Comments

[Thom]

The original plan for 1920 was to focus in on the unique and surprising cinema of Sweden, and write up something about Mauritz Stiller's slow-burning Erotikon. Alas, the DVD was delivered cracked. Oh well, that's the risk of receiving movies by mail. Though I'm kind of glad because The Last of the Mohicans inspired unexpected things to write about and I think I would have overlooked a visually imaginative movie otherwise.

[Brian]

Why? The most obvious (though by no means the only) answer has got to be: the cult of celebrity. Movie makers assume (and generally not wrongly) that audiences want to see familiar stars on the screen. There's a long tradition of white theatre actors making themselves up to play characters of other races, and indeed at one time it was practically required that an actor who wanted to demonstrate "range" do so. Whether or not such performances work in theatrical settings is a legitimate debate, but in cinema they're pretty much invariably a poor substitute for a non-white actor playing the part.

[Andrew]

Interesting write-up. A guest writer discussed this film at length on our site in an essay called American Indians in Film

[Thom]

Brian - Thanks for adding your thoughts on the post. I agree. This film was a commercial venture and Tourneur and co. figured that its best chance of commercial success was to cast stars in the major Native American roles (though that still doesn't explain the extras). The result looks silly and ultimately blows our suspension of disbelief to the detriment of the viewing experience. As you write, actors portray all manner of different people because, well, they're actors I think they could have done a better job casting this flick. Incidentally, I find it almost impossible to think about Wallace Beery without also thinking about Barton Fink (1991).

Andrew - Thanks. I'll check out the article over at your site.

[goatdog]

On a somewhat related note, I checked their reviews of Birth of a Nation (its original release and a 1920 revival), and there's no mention of the white actors in blackface. I wonder what it was about LOTM that made them single out the casting? Was it that Native American characters weren't as common in movies as black characters were, or that there was a longer tradition of whites in blackface than whites in, for lack of a better term, "redface", thus making it more acceptable to them?

[Thom]

I can't speak to the reviews of BOAN, but the Times review of Mohicans seems to be complaining that casting Beery and Roscoe in the leads marred an otherwise "extraordinary picture" because they didn't look like what the reviewer expected Hurons and Mohicans to look like and that ruined the authenticity of the presentation for him. I guess casting the actor best suited for the role might be the lesson there.

[maya]

That screen capture of Hurons on the warpath is hilarious, even as it reflects a very sad appropriation of identity.

[Thom]

Have I complimented your writing skills lately, Michael? You write in one sentence ideas that I struggle through a whole paragraph to get across.

[maya]

You struggle; we savor. Keep struggling!!