dir John Ford, scrpl Lamar Trotti, cin Bert Glennon, ed Walter Thompson
Efe Turner: Ain’t you goin’ back, Abe?
Abe Lincoln: No, I think I might go on a piece…maybe to the top of that hill.
In 1858, Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln defended his friend William Armstrong in a murder trial. The case remains notable for Lincoln’s use of a then obscure legal tactic, judicial notice. Using an almanac, Lincoln successfully challenged the testimony of a witness who claimed that bright moonlight provided enough light to observe the crime.
John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln uses this case as the basis of its fictionalized account of the future president’s early life. Mostly a courtroom drama, Lincoln is presented as expected. He is intellectual, dedicated and deeply serious about the law. He has a good sense of humor, though, which he uses to effectively disarm both an angry lynch mob and his legal opponents. In other words, the film is not about a real man, but the marbleized icon memorialized in Washington, D.C.
It’s almost startling how nakedly patriotic Ford’s film is. Today audiences and critics practically demand that biographies are “warts and all” affairs. If a portrayal doesn’t sufficiently demonize some aspect of the character’s character, highlight some self-destructive flaw, then it’s dismissed as nothing more than hero-worship.
It’s no surprise then that Henry Fonda first turned down the role, likening the task to playing Jesus Christ. While I appreciate that Ford wanted to pay tribute to an icon, the film would have been more effective it it was more focused.
In some ways this is a paint-by-numbers biography, simply cramming in all of the elements we may not have learned in elementary school. So while there is only passing mention of the one-room log cabin, learning to read by firelight and Abe’s reputation for honesty, other bits of Lincoln’s early life—like his talent at rail splitting
—are shoehorned in. An alleged relationship with Ann Rutledge, and Lincoln’s early courtship of Mary Todd are both chronicled, but in an off-hand way. They’re mostly irrelevant to the story, especially in a fictionalized account.
Young Mr. Lincoln would be a much stronger film if it cut out all of the superfluous material, focusing solely on the courtroom drama, this is where the film really shines. Watching Fonda working to free his clients, I kept thinking about his much later role as a juror in 12 Angry Men (1957). There too, Fonda is impassioned, working nimbly to persuade his fellow jurors of reasonable doubt. If only the story here was a bit more tighter, focusing on Lincoln’s efforts to sway his jury, to foster doubt, it may have presented Lincoln as something more like a real man, as opposed to a idealized legend.