To me, this movie is perfection.

How sad is this?

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The Last Hunt is a wonderful piece of Western film making. Richard Brook's script and direction are top notch. Robert Taylor gives one of the best performances of his career as Charlie, a man who seems to be in love with killing and hatred, yet has a tender side to him brought out by the Indian girl he takes captive. The film is a wonderful character study of two men who are totally opposite in the way they feel about killing. And so much of the conflict within the picture results from the differences in their characters.The supporting cast is great with Lloyd Nolan and Russ Tamblyn being the standouts. The Last Hunt is hardly ever mentioned in the great westerns, but I feel it should be. It is a great film that has been overlooked way too long. Any western fan or Robert Taylor definitely need to check it out.

This MGM western goes above and beyond what most frontier films from the studio were doing, or attempting to do, at this time. And as such, it proves to be not only highly entertaining, but a tribute to what sort of range Robert Taylor has as an actor. He is quite good as an on-screen cad.Often, Mr. Taylor is put into underwritten romantic leads where the female costar gets all the glory. (The main female in The Last Hunt is the very unassuming Debra Paget.) But this time, the actor has been served a meaty role and he does a convincing job playing against type. Costar Stewart Granger also gets to dig a little deeper, thanks to Richard Brooks' expert screenplay and direction. The British westerner gets off a few good jabs in a well-staged barroom scene with some redneck Yanks.

I saw this movie (at a drive-in with my family) about the time, or not long after, it came out. I was eleven or twelve. I remembered scenes from this flick for fifty years until seeing it again on TCM. These scenes (a frozen buffalo hide, a guy sharpening a skinning knife, the white buffalo and its hide, and the final unforgettable scene) stayed with me for years. The movie still has power, though not as much as the mental rewrite I gave it over a half century ago threading together the scenes I recalled (nothing about the sex in my pre-adolescent memory). I found the editing and cinematography pretty poor when I looked at it a second time but the story was still good. I recall my father saying after the movie, "I thought Robert Taylor said he wasn't going to do that kind of role any more." I don't know what he meant. This is perhaps Taylor's best movie. He plays a very nasty villain. And maybe that's what my father was talking about. Anyway, a curious and interesting western, exploring themes that western writers had opened up long before but were new to Hollywood. It's too bad that the lead native roles were given to Russ Tamblyn and Debra Paget, but that was 50's Hollywood. Worth watching, but mentally re-edit this film and see if you can't come up with a classic must-see.

Robert Taylor began his career at MGM as a handsome young lead with an eager smile in the mid 30s. Somewhere along the time line, during the war years, as he lost his youthful looks, he came to appear stern and not particularly sympathetic. At the same time his acting because routinized, automatic, giving a performance for him became like driving a car is for us. You don't put any thought into it. This didn't keep his studio from casting him in semi-historical costume movies. Whether or not he could act, at least he didn't get in the way of the scenery. Nor did he appear to seek out more dramatic roles that might be more in keeping with his appearance and demeanor. He and MGM were satisfied enough.Then, here, in 1956, during his mature period, comes this movie, "The Last Hunt," in which Taylor plays probably his most complex character role and gives it everything he's got, mixing meanness and pathos. I give it a bonus point for that alone. It's almost amusing to see the man criticized for overacting. Think about it. Robert TAYLOR? OverACTING? He usually has all the verve of a mechanical man in a circus side show. To accuse him of overacting is like accusing a clam of having moved. It's a Western about professional buffalo hunters in 1883. The big herds are thinning out. Taylor is still bent on shooting as many buffalo as he can, while his partner, Stewart Granger, has become a reluctant companion. The killing that the two friends have seen in the Civil War has changed them, but in different ways. It's sickened Granger, while Taylor has found that he rather likes it.On the eponymous final hunt, they pick up a young Indian boy (Russ Tamblyn) and an experienced old buffalo skinner (Lloyd Nolan). A skirmish with some Indians, whom Taylor happily shoots, gets Taylor a beautiful Indian woman to keep him warm at night (Debra Paget).The movie is sensitive to hunters pretty much having wiped out the buffalo. (It's a little like A. B. Guthrie's novel, "The Big Sky.") And it shows respect for the Sioux and their religion. But except for one or two sentences, it's not preachy, so it would be a mistake to code this as some tender-minded revisionist tract. For what it's worth, the high plains tribes I've lived with still revere the buffalo. They used every single part of every animal they were able to kill. As one Blackfeet man put it, "they were a supermarket." At any rate, Taylor's performance is the key to the movie, and it's quite good. His character follows a trajectory similar to that of Fred C. Dobbs in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", although Taylor is no Bogart, nor does this script have nearly the same quality. But Taylor is friendly enough at the beginning. Oh, a little insensitive to others, but cheerfully optimistic, and loyal to his pal Granger. But then he becomes mercurial. By the end, he's a madman, mistaking the rumble of distant thunder for a hundred thousand buffalo. That final shot of Taylor, wrapped in a frozen buffalo hide, his face a grotesque mask coated with ice, is memorable.The shooting, alas, is often studio bound. Speech made around the camp fire seems to echo slightly. It's cold but no one's breath steams. It's good to see the manly Stewart Granger as something other than the alpha male. He's not as fast with a gun as Taylor. Nobody is. Granger is given one good scene, as a sad, truculent drunk in a cat house, and he pulls it off well. The fist fight isn't played for laughs. Constance Ford is the whore who administers some superficial comfort to the drunken Granger but he shrugs her off and leaves. Angry, she shouts after him, "What do you think, I have a heart of gold?" (Nice touch.)Nice job, but sad too. Taylor, and people with his tragic flaws, have left us all a little worse off than we might have been.