Retrospective 2015

The Last Hunt

Richard Brooks
USA 1956
103 min
V'15

This condemnation of the slaughter of the buffalo is perhaps the toughest, most polemical and least compromising of all the pro-Indian 50’s Westerns, as one might expect from a film directed by Richard Brooks during Dore Schary’s time as head of production at MGM, when ‘social consciousness’ was the order of the day. In his central character, the Indian-hating hunter Charles Gilson, for whom‘one less buffalo means one less Indian’, Brooks has painted an unforgettable picture of racism and pathological machismo. Hardly surprisingly, this bleak and violent film was a commercial disaster, but is one of Brook’s finest works, in which the message is never allowed to dominate the action and arises naturally from the material. A vitriolic exercise in demythologization, THE LAST HUNT is a meditation not only on violence but on America itself. (Julien Petley)

Supporting film: CHASSE AUX PHOQUES DANS LA MER DE LA TASMANIE (SEEHUNDJAGD IN TASMANIEN)

Credits
  • Robert Taylor - Charles Gilson
  • Stewart Granger - Sandy McKenzie
  • Lloyd Nolan - Woodfoot
  • Debra Paget - Indianerin
  • Russ Tamblyn - Jimmy
  • Richard Brooks after a novel by Milton Lott
  • Russell Harlan
  • Wesley C. Miller
  • Ben Lewis
  • Daniele Amfitheatrof
  • Cedric Gibbons
  • Merrill Pye
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
35 mm
col
Related Movies