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The Slingshot DVD of this title is stunning to watch -- a transfer from the original negative at the George Eastman House
that looks as though it might have been shot yesterday (or the day before yesterday.) The film itself, made in 1920, is admirable
in every way -- the acting is underplayed, the photography gorgeous, each shot framed handsomely, with well-staged action
sequences and many deft visual touches. But the result is somewhat bloodless -- it's a film without pulse and heart.
Eileen Whitfield, in her biography of Pickford, reports that Tourneur and his star clashed while making "The Poor
Little Rich Girl" over bits of comedy that Tourneur felt beneath his dignity as an artist. Pickford felt he just didn't
have a sense of humor. Perhaps it's Tourneur's "dignity" and self-conscious seriousness that sink "The Last
Of the Mohicans". One longs for the recklessness and even the vulgarity that charged up lesser films by less skilled
directors in the silent era. The clumsy melodrama of Griffith's "America" seems thrilling by comparison, because
it represents, at the very least, an artist willing to make a fool of himself in his ambition to move us.
There is some vulgarity here, but it isn't fun. Wallace Beery, entertaining as he is, and Alan Roscoe make very unconvincing
Indians, and the shocking ferocity of the Indian atrocities seems like a cheap substitute for the juice lacking in the film
as a whole.
The central problem I guess lies with Barbara Bedford, the female lead. She's lovely, with some of Gish's delicacy, but
none of Gish's complication. She underplays to a fault. In many scenes she looks as though she's composing herself, getting
ready for the camera to start rolling. It's not a bad performance, there just isn't much to it. And if you don't care about
Cora, you can't care about this story, with its somewhat daring and admirable cross-cultural romance.
Tourneur's visual style is not strictly "pictorial" -- there's great plastic beauty in many of the images he
creates, and a skillful choreography of movement, but it's tepid. Aside from some dynamic tracking shots of Cora and her sister
in the march out of the fort, and a few shots of villains pouncing forward into the camera, the images don't often unfold
spatially in exciting ways -- the effect is static, even when there's great depth in the field of view.
The finale, with it's stand-off on the precipice, the fight beside the waterfall, the surreal burials, achieves a kind
of luminous dreamlike quality, but it's not charged with emotion. The scenes seem like wonderful cinematic illustrations of
a story that hasn't been told.
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