LAST OF THE MOHICANS SCREENIT WINDOWS

Immediately after the massacre at Fort William Henry, lovely, long-tressed Cora and her lovely sister Alice find themselves kidnapped by a Very Bad Man. You and I and the characters are scrambled up in the French and Indian Wars of the period.

Every wheeze that blew through the lore was engendered by Fenimore Cooper, a man who just couldn't stop cooking up these stories (there are not only the five Leather-Stocking tales but some thirty other books that he spawned in his long, wordy life). The vocabulary of this novel is the one that built Cowboy-and-Indian of our youth: tomahawks, happy hunting grounds, redskins, pale-faces, hawk-eyes, wampum, forked-tongue, scalping, totems, wigwams. There are dozens of tribes represented here - Mohicans, Hurons, Delaware, Lenape, Mingos, Mengwe - and they are all at war with the French, or the English, or with each other, but never with the forest only the palefaces have trouble with the forest they certainly cannot read its signals. And now and so it is, I find out, with the book itself. We never could figure out where the plot was going, nor why. for the world, at least the wild world of ERPI Classroom Films, all was but black and white.

All this came to us in black, dark gray, gray, light gray, or white. When they were not skulking about the woods they crept up on the palefaces in their large dark forts. The Indians wore buckskin and carried tomahawks. faces heavy with paint (both ladies and Indians). but since we didn't have television in those days what better way to spend the hot Florida Wednesday afternoon than in the high-ceilinged room watching men go about half-naked spying out of the branches in the forest, spying on lovely ladies in long dresses. There was one on Beethoven where he plays the piano and shakes his head then pounds the keyboard with his fists because he cannot hear the music, his face in a rage while we hear the wavery, unsteady notes of the 'Moonlight Sonata' in the background.Īnd then there was 'The Last of the Mohicans.' I remember it well because it went on endlessly. There was a film on a steel industry, industrially pure and patriotic (we were still at war with the Japanese): great vats of liquid this and that being poured with sparks spilling thrillingly out onto the floor. Kenny Walsh giggled at the shot of a naked back. There was another on good posture with black lines drawn down the spine. There was one on nutrition, showing barrels of wheat and rice and other grains and a doctor in a white coat lecturing the camera about vitamins and minerals with charts and a pointer. The films are produced by the ERPI film company, which my pal Donald Lamarr immediately labels 'Urpy Classroom Films' - urp being our word for throwup or vomit. Often during the course of the movie, the film will break, or the sound will turn fuzzy (once a film on Columbus actually crackled and sizzled on the screen right in front of our eyes) but we, the faithful students, will not be deterred, despite the heat and the sweat and that fat Kenny Walsh who always sits in the front row and laughs at the wrong places in the story. It takes her at least ten minutes to thread the projector and set up the screen. Ross runs the projector which is large and hot and sends a shaft of bright white light onto the ceiling as well as onto the screen. Ross's fifth grade room next door are pulled back and we turn our desks to face away from the black-curtained windows. When it's movie-time - usually Wednesday afternoons - the folding walls between Mrs.

LAST OF THE MOHICANS SCREENIT WINDOWS

The ceilings are high, the windows stand tall to catch the occasional breeze and the stench of the mud flats from tiny Fishweir Creek next door.

Last of the mohicans screenit