Le Grand Attentat

Okay this film the Tall Target may not be historically accurate but it is based on a situation that occurred on the Abraham Lincoln Inaugural Train.. It is an excellent movie brilliantly directed by Anthony Mann It is a film that was way ahead of its time.. Dick Powell stars and gives an outstanding performance Differrent than most of his film noir films of that era.. I was watching TCM @1am this morning (insomnia was setting in) when their brilliant host Robert Osborne announced and described this unusual film that most people had never seen or heard of! But he recommended & once again Osborne was correct. Wonderful powerful film made years before Suddenly and a decade or so before The Manchurian Candidate (other films dealing with presidential assassinations)The writers & director took an incident from history and created a fictionalized yet believable and riveting film .Is great definitely worth seeing & seeing a very young Ruby Dee in a small but important role as a loyal but concerned 'slave" also Leif Ericson and Barbara Billingsly (Beavers mom) have minor but important roles..& Adolphe Menjou is outstanding and quite believable a corrupt military official Powell is really good in this film A great surprise Don't Miss, another hidden gem revealed from the TCM film library.Thank you Ted Turner and Robert Osborne

The various Presidential assassinations have generated few first rate films. The best of the lot is Oliver Stone's JFK, but it is also quite controvertial as Stone takes for granted the conspiracy theory of A.D.A. Garrison of New Orleans (which was generally discredited). But Stone's movie does resurrect the real atmosphere of confusion and doubt that political murder retains to this date. So, for all it's defects, it does make its point.

There is no film about Garfield's assassination, and only one old film (THIS IS MY AFFAIR with Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, and Victor MacLaughlin) touched on McKinley's murder. With Lincoln you have no definitive film, a la JFK, but several movies that show the killing or deal with the events or personalitie around it. These include the two sequences in Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION and ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the film biography of Edwin Booth (PRINCE OF PLAYERS - with Richard Burton as Edwin, Raymond Massey as Junius Brutus Booth Sr., and John Derek as John Wilkes Booth), and the story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND (directed by John Ford, and starring Warner Baxter as the unfortunate Doctor - this may be the best of the Lincoln Assassination films due to Ford's excellent directing). And there is this nice little film directed by Anthony Mann, and starring Dick Powell and Adolphe Menjou. Historically, it is more accurate than some of the reviewers here would believe. An Italian barber named Fernandina was behind the plot (originated in Baltimore) in which a Pinkerton operative infiltrated the scheme to cause a disturbance while Lincoln was delivering a speech in Baltimore, and in the confusion give one of a dozen selected plotters a chance to kill the President-elect. Pinkerton tipped off Old Abe, and his stop in Baltimore was cancelled. Also, he boarded the train in Philadelphia in a disguise (a tam-a shanter and cape were suggested in the press). Lincoln was lampooned for being a silly coward by his opponents, but it was probably true - during the initial weeks of the Civil War Baltimore got more military treatment (including a massacre of a mob of citizens by Massachusetts soldiers) than any other Northern trouble-spot. Fernandina disappeared in the next few months (his eventual fate remains unknown). Pinkerton (who had worked with Lincoln in Illinois, dealing with the Illinois Central Railroad - which also brought him into contact with General McClellan) went on to create the Secret Service. If he overestimated Southern strength, it was unfortunate - but he was a great detective. For all the fictional aspects of the film's script, the movie does capture the urgency of the situation, and the uncertainty of the early days of the Civil War.

"Ninety years ago a lonely traveller boarded the night train from New York to Washington D.C., and when he reached his destination his passage had become a forgotten chapter in the history of the United States. This motion picture is a dramatisation of that disputed journey."

The Tall Target is directed by Anthony Mann and written by George Worthing Yates, Daniel Mainwaring (as Geoffrey Holmes) and Art Cohn. It stars Dick Powell, Paula Raymond, Adolphe Menjou, Marshall Thompson and Will Geer. As the above opening salvo suggests, story is disputed, it's based around the so called Baltimore Plot, a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln; the tall man of the title who is on the train heading for his inauguration.

Set mostly aboard a train, Mann's The Tall Target is a very tight noirish type period thriller that sees Powell's gruff detective try and protect Abe Lincoln from assassins lurking within the confines of the locomotive hauled express. Although a low budget production, there is some smart period detail to enjoy and the cramped setting of the train interiors allows Mann to infuse the story with paranoia and claustrophobic tints. Major bonus is that the makers excellently capture what must have been a powder keg of political uncertainty in 1861, this is born out by the number of interesting characters with a voice aboard this train. Thus the suspense and mystery elements are not confined to being of the obvious variety.

With Paul Vogel's black and white photography adding some period bite, and putting the noirish sheen to scenes such as the ones involving smoke, it's a shame that the cast are mostly hit and miss. Powell just about carries off the tough-guy persona, with the scenes shared with Menjou good value, and Geer is the stand out as the jobs worth conductor. Raymond is lovely, but hardly puts a stamp on proceedings, while Thompson is badly inadequate when it comes to putting the threat into threatening situations. But they are only minor itches that fail to derail the film from the tracks, because ultimately it's the story that is the star, a story boosted no end by Mann's taut direction. 7.5/10

"The Tall Target," about a plot to kill Lincoln before his inauguration, is a compact little film directed by Anthony Mann and starring Dick Powell, Adolphe Menjou, Marshall Thompson, and Ruby Dee. Powell plays John Kennedy, a detective and admirer of the future President who finds out about an assassination plot and hopes to stop it, although his written report seems to fall on blind eyes. On board a train, Kennedy finds the person he was to meet is dead, someone is impersonating him, and, from all the political talk, there are lots of suspects who hate Lincoln as the country gets ready for war.

Most of the action takes place on the train and the atmosphere and black and white cinematography neatly capture the period. The performances are all excellent, including that of Will Geer as the train conductor and Ruby Dee as a young slave whose mistress' brother (Thompson) is a prime suspect in the assassination plot. Twenty years earlier, Dick Powell was a boy tenor playing male ingénues opposite Ruby Keeler; in the '40s, he turned to tough detective type roles, and ultimately became a highly successful producer. He's very good in "The Tall Target" but a little too modern in manner and dialogue delivery. It's somewhat noticeable because the period is captured very well by the other actors.

This is a very good movie with a neat ending and based on a true incident. There was, by the way, a John Kennedy who was a former law enforcement officer who served in the Lincoln administration. Whether he was involved in this situation, I don't know. It's a wonderful story nonetheless.

Superbly directed and photographed, and very well acted by Dick Powell, Will Geer, and Adolph Menjou, this movie ranks as one of director Anthony Mann's best achievements. Not one of his trademark noirs, it still has the characteristic tense look and feel, while staking out its own claim to originality, capturing the mood of the country as it is about to explode into a bloodbath. Set on the eve of the Civil War, a New York police detective (Dick Powell) boards a southbound train in New York to foil a conspiracy to assassinate President elect Lincoln. The train setting provides an apt stage in which the passions of the day are played out, with Unionists and Secessionists armed to the teeth. Factually, the details are probably off, but the mood of the time seems to be fairly accurately portrayed.