Young Mr. Lincoln

Amazingly, I have just seen this film for the first time. I was not expecting such a wonderful portrayal by Mr. Fonda and the accuracy (within Hollywood limits of the time) by Mr. Ford. I am no Lincoln historian, but I have read enough about him that I recognize the truth in the spirit of this film. A number of details could certainly be noted as historically inaccurate; on the other hand, the image of Mr. Lincoln as a lawyer who cares for people, truth, and mercy is quite accurate. One reviewer writes that Mr. Lincoln is made to appear as a country bumpkin, using humor when he is unable to use anything useful. To the contrary, Mr. Lincoln was realistic about his country origins; he used humor to convince, drive home an important point, and win people to his view; he was self-effacing. The manner in which Mr. Fonda portrays him in this film does homage to the man. The film may conflate history for entertainment purposes (it is, after all, a Hollywood production), but it is not as unhistorical as many believe. While sentimental (as to be expected of a 1939 film about an American icon), Young Mr. Lincoln is an admirable presentation of the spirit of the man.

Young Mr. Lincoln(1939) was released in the same year as another classic by John Ford called Stagecoach(1939). Its amazing that two great films like these were overlooked for the Best Picture award of 1939. Tells the fictitious but compelling story of the early days of Abraham Lincolm when he was a young struggling lawyer. He shows traits that made him famous during his role as the President of the United States. He does have a touch of the Sherlock Holmes method of solving crimes for he uses it to have defend a man falsely accused of murder.

Patriototic motion picture that is one of my favorite films from John Ford. Henry Fonda is perfect in the role of the young Abraham Lincoln. In fact, he bears a little resemblence to the late admired and revered, Abraham Lincoln. Fonda gives a performance of admiring humaine tenderness. Many of the scenes in Young Mr Lincoln(1939) are done with beauty and finesse.

This film was not only one of John Ford's own personal favorites but also numbered directors Sergei M. Eisenstein and Bertrand Tavernier among its high-profile admirers. Ironically, I've just caught up with it myself via Criterion's recent 2-Disc Set after missing out on a couple of original language screenings of it on Italian TV many years ago and again a few times on TV while in Hollywood!

The film marked Ford's first of nine collaborations with Henry Fonda and is also a quintessential example of Ford's folksy Americana vein. A beautifully made and pictorially quite poetic piece of work, the courtroom sequences (and eventual revelation) in its second half still pack quite a wallop, apart from giving stalwart character actor Donald Meek a memorably meaty role as the prosecuting attorney.

Fonda is, of course, perfectly cast as a bashful, inexperienced but rigorous and humanistic lawyer who was destined to become President; Fonda would go on to portray other fictitious politicians on film - most notably in Franklin J. Schaffner's THE BEST MAN (1964) and Sidney Lumet's FAIL-SAFE (1964) - and it's surprising now to learn that he was reluctant at the time about accepting the role of Lincoln since, in his view, that was "like playing God"!

It is interesting to note here that Ford had previously tackled Abraham Lincoln (tangentially) in THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND (1936), a superb but perhaps little-known gem which has, luckily, just been released as a Special Edition DVD by the UK's veritable Criterion stand-in, Eureka's "Masters Of Cinema" label. Besides, I also have two more Abraham Lincoln films in my DVD collection which I've yet to watch and, incidentally, both were directed by D. W. Griffith - THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) and ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1930) - and, had I not just received a bunch of films I've never watched before just now, I would have gladly given them a spin based on my highly-satisfying viewing experience with YOUNG MR. LINCOLN.

In his otherwise excellent book, Lincoln in American Memory, the historian Merrill Peterson calls Young Mr.Lincoln a "boring, dreadful, film". This amazingly wrongheaded analysis simply proves that great historians are rarely fine film critics. I am working on a doctoral dissertation on Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. As part of my preparation for writing the dissertation, I made a careful analysis of this film, and of Tag Gallaghers brilliant interpretation of it in his seminal book on Ford. Young Mr. Lincoln comes out that culminating year of the first phase of Ford's cinematic authorship, 1939.In that greatest of Hollywood years, Ford directed three superb, still not fully appreciated films: Drums Along the Mohawk, Stagecoach,and Young Mr.Lincoln. It might seem odd to say that Stagecoach is not fully appreciated, all but the most purblind of critics must perceive that it is one of of the greatest Westerns, and perhaps even one of the hundred greatest films of all time. However, what is NOT fully appreciated is that these three films work together as a kind of trilogy-a triptych, in fact. Ford is creating a sort of mythic history of America on screen. Drums Along the Mohawk is the Revolutionary War. Young Mr.Lincoln is pre-Civil War America.Finally, Stagecoach is Post Civil War America. What the three films have in common is that they are an extended meditation on the American Adam and his "errand into the Wilderness". What are the Psychic and social costs of American manifest destiny, as America strives to build a new human city in the wilderness?Lincoln symbolizes Americas journey, as he seeks to reconcile the civilizational inmpulse (law), with the freedom of the wilderness.Young Mr.Lincoln is not history, ( It is full of historical "howlers'-as both Ford and Trotti were well aware), but myth. This is Lincoln, the symbol of justice and mercy, Lincoln, the man of the wilderness, striving to found a civilization within himself, and to become the "remarkable lawgiver' of young America. Young Mr. Lincoln is not history-like James Agee's long forgotten teleplay about Lincoln, and like Sandburgs biography, it is an epic poem...a very beautiful epic poem.

Young Mr. Lincoln marks the first film of the director/star collaboration of John Ford and Henry Fonda. I recall years ago Fonda telling that as a young actor he was understandably nervous about playing Abraham Lincoln and scared he wouldn't live up to the challenge.

John Ford before the shooting starts put him at ease by saying he wasn't going to be playing the Great Emancipator, but just a jack-leg prairie lawyer. That being settled Fonda headed a cast that John Ford directed into a classic film.

This is not a biographical film of Lincoln. That had come before in the sound era with Walter Huston and a year after Young Mr. Lincoln, Raymond Massey did the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Robert Sherwood Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Massey still remains the definitive Lincoln.

But as Ford said, Fonda wasn't playing the Great Emancipator just a small town lawyer in Illinois. The film encompasses about 10 years of Lincoln's early life. We see him clerking in a general store, getting some law books from an immigrant pioneer family whose path he would cross again later in the story. And his romance with Ann Rutledge with her early death leaving Lincoln a most melancholy being.

Fast forward about 10 years and Lincoln is now a practicing attorney beginning to get some notice. He's served a couple of terms in the legislature, but he's back in private practice not really sure if politics is for him.

This is where the bulk of the action takes place. The two sons of that family he'd gotten the law books from way back when are accused of murder. He offers to defend them. And not an ordinary murder but one of a deputy sheriff.

The trial itself is fiction, but the gambit used in the defense of Richard Cromwell and Eddie Quillan who played the two sons is based on a real case Lincoln defended. I'll say no more.

Other than the performances, the great strength of Young Mr. Lincoln is the way John Ford captures the mood and atmosphere and setting of a small Illinois prairie town in a Fourth of July celebration. It's almost like you're watching a newsreel. And it was the mood of the country itself, young, vibrant and growing.

Fans of John Ford films will recognize two musical themes here that were repeated in later films. During the romantic interlude at the beginning with Fonda and Pauline Moore who played Ann Rutledge the music in the background is the same theme used in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for Vera Miles. And at a dance, the tune Lovely Susan Brown that Fonda and Marjorie Weaver who plays Mary Todd is the same one Fonda danced with Cathy Downs to, in My Darling Clementine at the dance for the raising of a church in Tombstone.

Lincoln will forever be a favorite subject of biographers and dramatists because of two reasons, I believe. The first is he's the living embodiment of our own American mythology about people rising from the very bottom to the pinnacle of power through their own efforts. In fact Young Mr. Lincoln very graphically shows the background Lincoln came from. And secondly the fact that he was our president during the greatest crisis in American history and that he made a singularly good and moral decision to free slaves during the Civil War, albeit for some necessary political reasons. His assassination assured his place in history.

Besides Fonda and others I've mentioned special praise should also go to Fred Kohler, Jr. and Ward Bond, the two town louts, Kohler being the murder victim and Bond the chief accuser. Also Donald Meek as the prosecuting attorney and Alice Brady in what turned out to be her last film as the pioneer mother of Cromwell and Quillan. And a very nice performance by Spencer Charters who specialized in rustic characters as the judge.

For a film that captures the drama and romance of the time it's set in, you can't do better than Young Mr. Lincoln.