Presented by Chicago Film Society | CLICK HERE to Purchase Tickets 

The public domain prestige film is basically as old as Hollywood itself. Cheaper than adapting contemporary stories and more “respectable” than most of the fare on studios’ production slates, these films have long proved catnip for awards-hungry producers. You could be forgiven for writing off the genre as a whole, given how many of these films remain page-bound, turgid, and fit only for showing in 11th grade English classrooms, but then you’d be missing out on action film impresario Michael Mann’s essential contribution to the canon. Somewhere between a Colonial wuxia fight scene showcase and heartrending masculinist melodrama, The Last of the Mohicans was both a departure from Mann’s well-trod universe of moody cops and thieves and a perfect distillation of the romantic currents that define the director’s very best work. Daniel-Day Lewis stars, in a performance that is roughly 50% hair, as Nathaniel “Hawkeye” Poe, a white man raised among the Mohawk tribe who finds himself romantically entangled with the daughter of a British army officer and subsequently trapped between adversaries in the French and Indian War. Subsequently reissued digitally in a variety of different cuts, the original theatrical version has remained broadly unavailable since the VHS-era. We’ll be showing this cut in the best way possible, on 35mm, the only format capable of conveying the sumptuous beauty of both the film’s Blue Ridge Mountain locations and Lewis’s impeccable jawline.

Preceded by: Trailer reel