The Last of the Mohicans (Director's Expanded Edition)

Adventure, Romance, War, Western

Daniel Day-Lewis	Hawkeye (Nathaniel Poe)
Madeleine Stowe	Cora Munro
Jodhi May	Alice Munro
Russell Means	Chingachgook
Eric Schweig	Uncas
Steven Waddington	Maj. Duncan Heyward
Wes Studi	Magua
Maurice Roëves	Col. Edmund Munro
Patrice Chéreau	Gen Montcalm
Edward Blatchford	Jack Winthrop

Director	Michael Mann
Producer	A. Hunt Lowry; Michael Mann; Hunt Lowry
Writer	Christopher Crowe; Michael Mann; James Fenimore Cooper; John L. Balderston

Wildly romantic, daringly exciting, Michael Mann's film of James Fenimore Cooper's novel created a new babe magnet out of Daniel Day-Lewis, he of the heaving pecs and flowing mane. As Hawkeye, he plays an American settler raised by the Mohicans who is forced to serve as a guide for British adventurism in upstate New York. But the British have been outflanked by the French (and their Indian allies); then British honor is betrayed when a band of renegades assaults them during their retreat. Mann captures the viciousness of this era's hand-to-hand combat in startling battle scenes. But he also invests the film with heartfelt romance, as the feelings swell between Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. The ending is a stunner, a long, nearly wordless sequence of battle and loss. Strong performances all around, particularly by Russell Means as Chingachgook and Wes Studi as the evil Magua. --Marshall Fine