6/10
A Reasonable Portrayal of Cooper's Book
19 February 2017
I have to say that being an English major and having taught for many years, I always found these James Fenimore Cooper books incredibly dull. They were so talky an descriptive. I would imagine creating a screenplay for one wasn't so hard because most of the setup was there. So what gets pulled out is a sort of generic pioneer guy (Daniel Boone like) and the adventures he had. At his side was his Indian buddy and his adversaries were usually other tribal characters. He had the long rifle which had to reloaded time after time. He was feared by his enemies because he managed to be pretty much alone. Women were there but they were silly (some say Cooper never met one) and pretty much to be rescued. This is probably the most entertaining book and the one movies seem to latch on to. Randolph Scott does an adequate job as Hawkeye (for some reason the same guy had different name in the books). The non Native American actors are also adequate.
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