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...Hers is an achieved portrait of a woman of great delicacy who, finding herself in the midst of hell, summons the strength to survive without surrendering that delicaCommonweal cy...

...As Hawkeye's lover, Madeleine Stowe is so beautiful that she too invites the injustice of being taken as visual treat and nothing more...

...This Last of the Mohicans is both immediate and elegiac, gorgeous to look at but not embalmed by its own bealitiful photography, full of chases, hand-to-hand combat and "hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach," yet not lacking in contemplative passages that let you breathe and get to know the characters who will soon enough be in peril again...

...And when Bumppo is compelled by circumstances to betray extreme emotion, the actor delivers...

...In Brain Stoker's Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola shoots off one stunner after another...

...There is no conviction in this movie, only gore and camp...

...That element is sylvan...

...All three have lost their families to frontier violence: a recently orphaned young woman, her lover orphaned virtually at birth, and a middle-aged warrior, the last of his tribe, who has just witnessed, in the death of his son, the termination of his bloodline...

...Above the roar of a waterfall, Day-Lewis's voice cracks with urgency and defiance of despair...

...A quarrel between a British commander and his colonial militia is rendered in a long shot that is as balanced in composition and lighting as an eighteenth-century historical painting...

...Alas, Mann is most faithful to Cooper in his depiction of the interracial affair between Uncas and one of Colonel Munro's daughters as acoming together of handsome statues rather than lifelike lovers...

...In the supporting cast two performers deserve comment: the famous stage director Patrice Chereau for making General Montcalm a perfect mixture of delicacy and imperiousness, and Wes Studi for going way beyond political correctness in creating a villain, the treacherous Magua, whose ability to cherish hatred is at one, in his own mind, with the pride he takes in his race...

...I couldn't have been more wrong...

...At every good fireworks display I've attended, the masters of sparklers and rockets have been careful to keep their launches decidedly un' even in beauty and volume...

...But Mann is also a master of the unexpected delay...

...The camera races up and down the steps of castles and ships, scarlet scarves swirl in the wind, the Count turns not only into a bat but into a werewolf and a gargoyle, bodies fly through the air, blood geysers, Professor Von Helsing cries on like Rumpelstiltskin (frightful overacting by the great Anthony Hopkins), possessed women vomit torrents of blood (shades—scarlet shards instead of pea-green—of The ExorcistU), heads are lopped off in close-up...

...This forest is never shot in a melodramatically forbidding way but, though we are given lovely glimpses of waterfalls and ravines, there is nothing idyllic about it either...

...I will find you...

...it's acting of a high order...

...As in the book, this approach weakens the tragic climax of the story...

...Then the bullet finds it mark...

...But, in this movie sentimental primitivism has its charm...

...But one gets tired of him shouting "Presto...

...The huge, all-encompassing forest that is the New York State of 1757 (beautifully impersonated by North Carolina's woodlands as photographed by Dante Spinotti) is much more than the backdrop to the action...

...It is a virtual presence that threatens to absorb everything human that ventures near...

...What monstrosities would be wrought by the creator of Miami Vice and the urban crime movies, Thief and Manhunterl Hawkeye and Chingachgook dressed in designer buckskins gliding their custombuilt canoe past psychedelically lit waterfalls while Whitney Houston sings on the soundtrack...

...Daniel Day-Lewis has the longest, narrowest face and the broadest, richest talent of his acting generation...

...And since every single shot announces its own expensiveness, the overall result is distasteful...

...However, as Hawkeye takes aim at the last attacker, Mann first slowly pans his camera along the barrel of the marksman's rifle, then finally cuts to the hammer sticking...

...The screenplay, concocted by Mann and Christopher Crowe out of both the novel and the 1936 Randolph Scott movie, rearranges the book's love rivalries, relieves Natty Bumppo of his indifference to sex, disparages the British colonial policies with a vigor that Cooper never employed, kills off characters that the author spared, spares some that he dispatched, and, by necessity, speeds up and streamlines the plot...

...Day-Lewis's triumph is to make nondemonstrativeness magnetic...

...every twenty seconds...

...The result is an audience kept in a state of constant, pleasurable anticipation...

...He is as versatile as Guinness but has a sexual magnetism that Guinness never possessed...

...Camp loses its playfulness when it costs this much...

...If only he would calm down and simply tell the old story in a way that would convince us that he had once read the book as a boy and been thrilled by it...

...A heaven-storming explosion is followed by a mere crack and trickle of fire, that trickle by a fair amount of thunder, and that thunder by another Jovian upburst...

...The result isn't exactly tedium because it's sometimes fun to watch Uncle Frank's magic show...

...Michael Mann must have loved The Last of the Mohicans when he was a boy...

...But it seems to me that Hawkeye has learned from the Indians he has lived among to conceal his thoughts and emotions...

...It's been years since I waded into a Leatherstocking Tale but they've left pictures in my memory: not only forest combat and redcoats marching but evening sunlight gilding the redoubts of British forts, labyrinthine passageways behind waterfalls, torchlit caves...

...When Hawkeye covers a messenger's flight through enemy lines by firing from a stockade rampart, the scene is of course staged rapidly with each of the courier's assailants picked off just before they strike...

...richard alleva 18 December 1992:17...

...It is simply engulfing...

...But smoke on the horizon is likely to dissipate pretty quickly when subjected to in-your-face moviemaking...

...Mann's direction is beautifully flexible...

...He hasn't been very faithful to Fenimore Cooper's storytelling, but I hazard that he has been very faithful indeed to the daydreams that Cooper once gave him...

...This second or so of delay not only adds a jot of suspense but makes us feel the epic status of Hawkeye as a marksman: slowly, slowly, his bullets wend through the air but always, always, they hit the mark...

...There is one pop song used on the soundtrack of the new movie and it's momentarily disastrous...

...Mann has made an adventure film that haunts as well as excites...

...When I hear the title of a Cooper frontier novel, I think of smoke on the horizon...

...But the same sight in Coppola's film, though no less well-executed technically, is ineffective because it'sjustone more freak-show stunt following and preceding scores of other stunts...

...A very serious and unostentatious monster...

...But otherwise Mann has done a beautiful job...

...There is romantic, call-of-the-wild nihilism in this movie that is alien to the deeply conservative Cooper, who always balanced the claims of natural man against the demands of civilization...

...But, just when we are becoming too aware of the academic groupings, Mann cuts in to the faces of the disputants and the acceleration keeps the scene alive...

...And they will because they have lost their pasts...

...This is no visual phenomenon...

...Listen to his voice as he pleads with his lover, about to fall into enemy hands, to "Stay alive...

...The wilderness seems to invite these three to enter it, be absorbed by it...

...we hear the shot, see the messenger running, but also see his attacker still alive, still in motion, and about to strike...

...There is smoke on the horizon after all...

...Cooper's slowly unfolding narratives with their Latinate prose and pseudo-Shakespearean set-pieces of conspiracy and noble savage oratory appeal to few readers nowadays but they have their own integrity...

...all it The Law of Pyrotechnics as Applied to Cinema...

...In Mumau's great Nosferatu, the discovery of Dracula crawling head-first down his sheer castle wall was an unsettling sight because it emerged out of an atmosphere of hushed, subdued foreboding...

...Commonweal At the film's conclusion, three lone survivors stand on a cliff gazing at the same mountainous, misty woodland that filled the very first shot of the movie...

...His performance here as Hawkeye is so contained that the New Yorker's move critic labeled it a "visual phenomenon...

...Yet this version captures an element of Cooper's vision that is indispensable to the special magic of the story...