The Last of the Mohicans

James Fenimore Cooper's novel as a sweeping silent epic, shot in the California mountains standing in for 1757 upstate New York. Wallace Beery is the vengeful Huron Magua, Albert Roscoe the scout Hawkeye, and Barbara Bedford the kidnapped Cora, with Harry Lorraine as the Mohican Chingachgook. Maurice Tourneur began the picture but was injured when a car drove off a cliff, and his assistant Clarence Brown — later the director of Garbo's finest films — finished it, earning his first screen credit. Regularly ranked among the best silent adaptations of American literature, it was restored by the Library of Congress. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.