Deconstructing an American Myth: Hollywood and The Last of the Mohicans

Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 1993103 Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), a frontiersman raised by a Mohican chief, falls in love with Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe) an English officer's daughter in Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans. Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, All Rights Reserved 104 Walker / Last of the Mohicans Deconstructing an American Myth: Hollywood and The Last of the Mohicans Jeffrey Walker Since its initial two-volume publication on 6 February 1826 by the Philadelphia publishing house of Carey and Lea, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757 has probably generated more attention from Hollywood filmmakers than virtually any other American novel. From its first adaptations in 1909, as a D. W. Griffith one-reeler and in 1911 as two different one-reelers by the Powers and Thanhouser Film Companies, to its latest incarnation in 1992 as a Michael Mann potboiler, more than a dozen interpretations of the novel have appeared in various forms: silent picture, Mascot serial, animated version, BBC television series, and Hollywood epic.1 Considering the popular reception of the novel in Cooper's day, and the mythic story it spins about American frontier heroes, this attention seems deserved. Most Americans, if they have not read the novel (and most have not), have nonetheless read about it or read abridged versions of it, and our own popular culture has embraced it in a number of curious ways. Mark Twain made Cooper and his "offenses" against literary art in the Leather-Stocking tales part of his traveling lecture shows. More recently, the anti-hero of television's M*A*S*H, Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, we are told, received his sobriquet "Hawk-eye" because the Cooper tale was supposedly the only novel his father had ever read. That most Americans have never read The Last of the Mohicans is not surprising. Until the Fenimore Cooper family agreed to cooperate in the production of a responsibly-edited series of Cooper's fiction and non-fiction in the mid-1960s, The Last of the Mohicans (appearing in 1983 as part of that NEH-sponsored, CSE-sealed, SUNY Press-published series) was available for readers only in a plethora of corrupt texts. And while the absence of reliable Cooper texts has been partially responsible for Cooper's less than highly touted reputation as a man of letters, Twain certainly had something to do with this offense against the American literary canon. The fact remains that the novel has been praised more often for what it did not do, rather than for what it did. Film versions of the novel illustrate this strange reaction to Cooper's masterpiece and explain the distortion of the text, yet, ironically, Hollywood filmmakers are probably as responsible for generating interest in Cooper's novel over the years as literary critics or college and university professors. In translating Cooper's work for the screen, they highlight and make popular those elements of The Last of the Mohicans that have little to do with Cooper's original story, but have everything to do with twentieth-century American popular culture and taste. While most of Jeffrey Walker is an expert in Early American literature who has branched out into film studies, with special interest in films in the Studio Era. Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 1993105 the directors do a sterling job of presenting Cooper's mise en scene, none of their film versions of the novel accurately reproduce Cooper's plot, and few come close to understanding Cooper's theme. Despite these problems, film versions continue to be made because Hollywood sees the novel containing the ingredients of an American film classic, if for all the wrong reasons. When The Last of the Mohicans appeared in 1826, it was hailed by some as an American masterpiece. In the 18 February 1826 issue of the Philadelphia National Gazette, Robert Walsh remarked that Never since the days of our childhood has Fairy hand sported so with our feelings. . .Never has necromancer, or poet, held us so long enchanted. The work, from the beginning to the close, is one tissue of harrowing incidents, beautiful...