Note: Larry's Daily Mirror posts this year focus on clips from 1920 and 1960, so I will be watching movies from those years and writing about them on alternate weeks. After last week’s post on Roger Corman’s “The Little Shop of Horrors,” Mr. Corman netted an honorary Oscar, so these writings are clearly very influential! Suggestions of films are quite welcome.

Two words I never thought would come up in a review of “The Last of the Mohicans” (1920, directed by Clarence Brown and Maurice Tourneur): Onscreen infanticide! What a surprising movie.

I was all set for 70 minutes of Boy Scout action, with lots of tramping through the woods and maybe some close-ups of moccasin prints. But the movie is both lavishly romantic and over-the-top violent. It’s even got Boris Karloff in it, of all people. (Its Wikipedia page claims that Bela Lugosi is in it also, but the good writers there seem to have confused this film with a German version – released the same year – in which Lugosi stars as Chingachgook.)

Screenwriter Robert Dillon makes free with James Fenimore Cooper’s novel. The basic structure is similar: Two white women are escorted through the woods by a pair of Indians and their faithful companion Leatherstocking (or Lederstrumpf, as they say in Germany). But interestingly, the role of big white hero Leatherstocking  has been reduced to almost nothing; he’s pretty much just a sidekick to Mohican Chingachgook (Theodore Lorch) and his son Uncas (Alan Roscoe). The trio tries to protect the girls from evil Huron warrior Magua (Wallace Beery – isn’t that a great name?), with varying degrees of success.

The scenery and composition are gorgeous. I particularly love a sequence when the heroes are hiding in a cave from Magua, and the cave mouth frames a series of beautiful shots: Uncas lounging in the doorway as Cora (Barbara Bedford, as still and beautiful as a sculpture) watches him yearningly; the sunset outside; Magua’s warriors creeping by; the terrified group hiding within.

Also fantastic is a later scene when Magua’s lethal band (mad with fire-water from the French, we’re told) overruns the abandoned Ft. William Henry, swarming into a hospital room full of wounded British soldiers too weak to leave the fort. Their shadowy figures gradually fill the confined space, and the silence makes it tremendously eerie. I just loved it.

And yeah, graphic onscreen infanticide! One of Magua’s warriors menaces a British woman with a newborn, creeping up on her with a knife, then just yanks the baby from her arms and flings it into the air. You really don’t get that in your modern films. There’s also an impressive scene of Huron warriors stepping over rows of dead and dying, pausing to collect scalps. I expected things to be more sanitized.

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