Released in 1939, an astonishing 9 short years after D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, John Ford’s dramatic portrait shows us Lincoln prior to his rise to the national political stage. Acted in a large style that was likely accepted as genuine in its time and seems less so today, the film stars a young Henry Fonda as a man with simple aspirations to be a successful Springfield lawyer, but whose oratorial and interpersonal 
gifts show him fit to be propelled toward a larger destiny. As the film imagines it, Lincoln’s leap toward momentous popularity comes as the result of his representation of two brothers accused of murder, their trial consuming a great deal of the film. While the trial today seems like an overlong episode of Perry Mason, moments of the trial and the rest of the film paint a fascinating portrait of a man, combining biographical details and interpreting them through a reverent retrospective lens.
This interpretation of Lincoln strikes a balance on the continuum between Griffith’s portrayal of Lincoln as an unsophisticated country bumpkin and Gore Vidal’s imagining of a preternaturally politically saavy, articulate politician and orator. The film also addresses the subject of lynching, showing Lincoln dissuading a lynch mob at the door of the jail with a combination of self-depreciation and deftly concealed condescension to a crowd portrayed as simple and childlike. It turn out, sadly, that lynching was still a timely topic in 1939, a year when a proposed federal law to criminalize lynching had not yet passed, despite the federal government’s establishment of the Civil Rights Office to assist in state’s prosecution of lynchings. Only at the end of the film, though, does this tale of Lincoln aspire to rise above the ordinary, if not idealized, origins of the man. Only at the end does Lincoln strike the iconic image, and the subtle intimate portrait gives way to the heroic and mythological, all over the crescendo of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet... Leave one in the space below.
Leave a Comment