Michael Mann’s 1992 film of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans plays on Turner Classic Movies this month. I wrote about it for the TCM website.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye

James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans, a frontier adventure set in the Adirondacks in 1757, was one of the most popular books of its day. A century later, it remained a popular tale with Hollywood, first turned into a film in 1911 and remade in numerous incarnations for both the big screen and the small screen. Michael Mann’s 1992 film version is as much based on the 1936 version scripted by Philip Dunne and starring Randolph Scott as Hawkeye, the white man adopted and raised by a Mohican father, as it is on Cooper’s original novel, but it’s also reflective of its director and its time. Daniel Day Lewis plays a different kind of Hawkeye: rugged and wild with long flowing hair, a proto-counter culture son of mother nature in buckskin, living off the land with his father Chingachgook (Russell Means) and brother Uncas (Eric Schweig). They live in harmony with the white settlers of the wilderness, men and families who have left the transplanted European society of the cities to carve out lives of independence. But while they have distanced themselves from the European struggles for power and control, the war comes to them as the French and the British both lay claim to the lands of the New World.

Read the complete feature here. The Last of the Mohicans plays on TCM on Tuesday, May 11, and is available on DVD. A Blu-ray edition has been announced for later in 2010.

Public Enemies (Universal) is Michael Mann’s take on the gangster glory days of the depression, when the most flamboyant and notorious bank robbers became the outlaw heroes of the day. Mann plays on that mystique in casting Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, a charmer and a cagey media player who was careful to maintain his folk-hero status as a kind of Robin Hood figure taking on the system (the banks, the cops, the government that failed America) in the depths of the depression. And while he has no compunctions about taking civilian hostages as human shields, he acts more like a host than a kidnapper, sharing jokes with his temporary captives and turning their ordeal into an adventure that they’ll be able to tell the papers and newsreels.

Johnny Depp as John Dillinger

Mann is a director who loves to dissect the details of men at work and admire the professionalism of his characters in action, whether it’s the mechanics of a successful prison break or the systematic efforts of FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and his squad to patiently gather evidence and tail suspects until he pieces enough together to find his man. And this is a thinking man’s gangster film, less about thrills than the mechanics of Dillinger’s heists and Purvis’ investigation, which he executes with his usual precision. But it’s also about the end of the gangster era, shut down not just by the efforts of the FBI but the increasing power of the mob syndicate as it leaves violent crime behind for the less public activities like gambling. See my feature review on my blog here.

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Public Enemies (dir: Michael Mann)

An honest to goodness grown-up epic in the season of adolescent fantasies and overpriced empty action spectacles, Public Enemies is Michael Mann’s take on the gangster glory days of the depression, when the most flamboyant and notorious bank robbers became the outlaw heroes of the day. That makes Johnny Depp great casting as John Dillinger, whose spree of daylight bank robberies and daring getaways between May 1933 (when he was paroled after serving an almost nine-year prison stretch for armed robbery) and July 1934 got him branded “Public Enemy Number 1″ by the FBI and made him a folk hero to many Americans.

Johnny Depp is John Dillinger

Mann plays on that mystique in Public Enemies. Depp’s Dillinger is a charmer and a cagey media player. He targets banks not just because that’s where the money is, but because in the depths of the Depression, many dispossessed Americans saw banks as the enemy and Dillinger as a kind of Robin Hood figure getting some back for them. And while he has no compunctions about taking civilian hostages as human shields, he acts more like a host than a kidnapper, sharing jokes with his temporary captives and turning their ordeal into an adventure that they’ll be able to tell the papers and newsreels. Depp gives Dillinger a natural geniality born of confidence and courage that borders on thrill-seeking. He seems to thrive on the charge of executing a heist, whether it be a bank or a prison break. He’s cool and cagey, keeping his emotions in check on the job but for a cocky little grin that he lets slip when things are going his way, while off the job he lets himself fall for Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful hat check girl that becomes the love of his outlaw life.

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