Il cavaliere della libertà

I think it qualifies as a must-see film for all true scholars of the cinema. That is not to say that it is a good film. It is most certainly not. But this is really a perfect film in which to study the biggest change that this artistic medium ever experienced, the change from silence to sound. The whole film comes off as so, so awkward. It doesn't help that the script is awful. The film is actually over-ambitious, trying hard to cover the entire life of Abe, from birth to death. However bad Abraham Lincoln is, though, I myself found it more than watchable and always fascinating. 6/10.

Before writing this review I saw that publicity driven line about this film. Abraham Lincoln is a lot of things, but NOBODY ever accused him of being a great romantic. All I can say there is, Huh?

Abraham Lincoln is one of two sound films made by movie pioneer, David W. Griffith. It's also something of an atonement for Griffith who was accused fostering racism with his masterpiece silent work, The Birth of a Nation.

Maybe if Abraham Lincoln had been a better film it would have succeeded in being an atonement. It certainly had one of the best interpreters of Lincoln ever in Walter Huston. The film also in many ways looks like a newsreel of the Civil War era. Our image of that era and you can see it in Ken Burns documentary comes from Matthew Brady's still photographs. In crafting this and The Birth of a Nation, Griffith was heavily influenced by Brady's still photographs.

Lincoln's prarie years were better told in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Young Mr. Lincoln. Griffith should have stuck to the war years and made it in fact the Lincoln family story. One thing that would have done is eliminated Una Merkel as Ann Rutledge. Una Merkel had many a good role as a wisecracking dame in modern films. But in Abraham Lincoln she's just awful as Lincoln's lost love Ann Rutledge. It's a miracle she had a career after this film and a good one.

... "personally directed" by D. W. Griffith. Walter Huston stars as Lincoln, shown from his birth through his rough-and-tumble early years, his doomed romance with Ann Rutledge (Una Merkel), his marriage to the eccentric Mary Todd (Kay Hammond), and his election to the presidency, where he presided over the U. S. Civil War, during which he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, before being felled by an assassin's bullet.

Like most of Griffith's movies, this is a mixed bag of interesting choices, corny populism, and a rose-colored vision of the past. I was surprised by the opening of the film, set aboard a trans-Atlantic slave ship, featuring slave traders coldly discussing their remaining "inventory" as they toss a dead African overboard. As this was one of a few scenes missing its audio, I have a feeling it was often cut out during exhibition.

I was confused by Griffith's decision to cast E. Alyn Warren as both Stephen Douglas and Ulysses Grant: were there not enough qualified actors around? I liked seeing silent film stalwarts Hobart Bosworth and Henry B. Walthall as General Robert E. Lee and his attendant colonel, respectively. I liked Walter Huston as Honest Abe, and was surprised by how much he looked like the photographs of Lincoln in the last third of the film.

The biopic elements themselves are simplistic and hagiographic, and things seemed rushed, trying to tell his entire life story in 90 minutes. I was not a fan of Hammond as Mary Todd, and felt she dragged the proceedings down quite a bit.

Walter Huston gets an A for effort, his performance is certainly far too melodramatic, but he clearly put a lot of heart and soul into it. Besides, the melodrama is more the fault of director D.W. Griffith, who seems to have lost his touch with his talkie films. Very patriotic,not particularly well produced. It falls among those films that were in the transition from silent to sound and have that awkwardness about them. The art direction is rather peculiarly phony looking, and that last shot of the Lincoln Memorial, it seems it would have been cheaper and easier just to get actual footage of the monument itself, rather than to make that phony looking model

It seems incredible the leaps and bounds that were made in less than ten years of cinema back some 90 years ago. D W Griffith's portrait of the great, noble pioneer in U.S politics has all the standard techniques and flourishes that now seem to have become the norm.

Walter Houston looks to be perfectly cast as 'Abe' - towering and dominant without being domineering and having that air of quiet authority. That he was humanitarian and resisted conflict whenever able to. It was nice also to have wife Mary's domestic quibbles thrown in, making this an interesting character study rather than a stiff history lesson.

As for history, no, I didn't learn a great deal, but didn't expect to. I wanted more to see how one of the great pioneering film directors portrayed another Great Man. The wonderfully produced epitaph in the final seconds showed testament to the power of them both.

Yes, the film's sound is hissy and pretty scratchy (I viewed it on-line at Internet Archive) but compared to most movies, certainly of that era and posted on that site, I found it surprisingly enjoyable and effortless.