The Last of the Mohicans
They mean Mohawk, some kind of sub-tribe? I do not fully understand the Native American ways.
This is from the same year as 1492, and cut from the same cloth. The old ways, the non-epic epic. There’s no Michael Mann trademark here, no Heat not even Miami Vice. This is as serious as it gets.
Apparently this was based on a very old book series, adapted to film seven times, and relentlessly mocked by Mark Twain .
The core of the plot, part of the war between French and English over control of America, concerns a English fort being conquered by the French and their Huron allies. The English reinforcements fail to materialise and they surrender. The French are very magnanimous and let them go away, but the Huron ambush and murder them all.
The main characters are Tarzan, a white orphan taken by said Last of Mohicans. His father has another kid, but there is no tension there whatsoever, most characters are as flat as it gets.
They are semi-nomadic trappers, selling furs to Dutch since they pay better. They are friends with a frontier couple and a couple of kids, a bad omen indicating their sacrifice for plot convenience.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.