Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Young Mr. Lincoln
Directed by John Ford
Written by Lamar Trotti
1939/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Abe Lincoln: By jing, that’s all there is to it; Right and Wrong.[/box]

The grandeur of Ford’s vision of antebellum America is marred by the trite screenplay to my mind.

This highly fictionalized account of Lincoln’s(Henry Fonda)  career as a young lawyer and aspiring politician focuses, after some preliminaries, on his (fictional) defense of two brothers accused of murdering a town bully who harassed one’s wife.  The story manages to fit in Ann Rutledge, Mary Todd and Stephen Douglas.  Thankfully, Ford was able to forestall the studio’s wish to include a chance encounter between Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth.  With Alice Brady as the mother of the accused, Donald Meek as the prosecutor, and Ward Bond as an “eye witness”.

I thought Ford captured the texture of frontier life in 1830’s Illinois really well and there are some awesome river vistas in this.  Henry Fonda makes a convincing Lincoln in the first of his seven films with Ford.  While the film has many merits, it suffers from great-man syndrome and some fairly trite dialogue as far as I am concerned.

Young Mr. Lincoln was Oscar-nominated for its Original Story.

Clip – Lincoln judges a pie contest