The Favorites - Young Mr. Lincoln (#24)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Young Mr. Lincoln (1939/USA/dir. John Ford) appeared at #24 on my original list.

What it is • An obscure Illinois lawyer in the 1830s named Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) takes on a court case involving two brothers from a poor family (Richard Cromwell and Eddie Quillan), who have been accused of murder. This will be his first criminal trial, and it will force him to face down a lynch mob and move back and forth across several divides: between the isolated family he's defending and the solid community opposed to them, between the common folk who appreciate his good humor and the local elite who admire his intelligence, and between his own idealistic appeals to higher principles and his shrewd ability to employ emotional manipulation. We meet Lincoln before he's even chosen the law as a vocation, watching as he loses his fiancee Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore) and meets his future wife Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver). However, this is not the sort of biopic where we collect the "greatest hits" of a lifetime - it's very much focused on a single period and issue, much like Patton, Selma, or, well, Lincoln. Unlike those films, however, its key incident isn't a momentous turning point in the subject's legend but a much smaller moment, highly fictionalized (the screenplay by Lamar Trotti adapts a key detail from an actual Lincoln case, but it occurred many years later when he was already a national figure, and the circumstances were mostly very different). Perhaps this is what gives the movie its extra edge: the proceedings are allowed to be both laid back and subtly symbolic (Lincoln is encouraged to split the brothers' defense in order to save one, which only now occurs to me as a likely "house divided" nod). Just like Lincoln himself, the film is deceptively low-key in approach while slowly summoning up a deep sense of grandeur and gravity.

Why I like it •

Lincoln

Think of it like those old early thirties posters, advertising the vocal debut of some silent film star: "Lincoln Talks!" We've heard him speak before, of course. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln was one of the earliest notable talkies - and one of the last films of D.W. Griffith (the Spielberg of his day, though he didn't bode so well in the long term). This was followed by dozens of Lincoln biopics, some trying as Griffith did to capture the whole sweep, others wisely focusing - as this Lincoln does - on a particular aspect or era in Lincoln's life (the best of these being John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, an almost entirely fictional depiction of the gangly lawyer for Illinois which manages to keenly evoke Lincoln's ability to be both convincingly honest and morally ambiguous).

Yet even after all of these movies, when we see Lincoln's historical visage we imagine a voice sturdy and worn, certainly not booming and bellowing like an overblown orater yet conveying depth and solidity between the folksy self-deprecation. Thus it comes as a bit of a shock to hear Daniel Day-Lewis' thin, reedy delivery, almost too flimsy to command attention yet apparently very accurate to the real Lincoln's tones. The voice is also very reflective of the film itself, packaging a grand figure modestly and in a sense underwhelmingly, so that we're almost sitting forward in our seats, straining to catch a sense of the taciturn magnitude dancing behind the images like the fleeting shadows and pools of light in Janusz Kaminski's photography or the brief moments of warfare and desolation dappled between interior intrigues and extended dialogues.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is certainly an interesting film, but unfortunately most of the interest lies in its historical and auteurist connotations rather than in the film itself. It's a curiosity rather than a success. Still, it shows D.W. Griffith grappling with a fundamentally altered medium - this is his first sound film - and if it's often creaky and dated, it's really not all that bad for an early talkie. Actually its problems lie not so much in the technique - though it's a bit stilted, Griffith seems to have taken to sound rather easily - but in structure. Its problems haven't changed much in 80 years: the biopic is still a risky and haphazard genre. By relaying a pile-on of incidents in Lincoln's life and career, this movie (like many which followed in its wake) feels less like a cohesive album than a Greatest Hits collection, and one in which the recordings are often muddy and indistinct. Still, Walter Huston offers one of the best Lincolns ever to grace the screen and Griffith crafts some effective sequences in his penultimate feature.