Lincoln on Film
by Spencer Warren
Issue 125 - February 4, 2009

Usually it is impossible to recreate believably a renowned historical figure on stage or screen, especially in the case of our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, the bicentenary of whose birth we observe on February 12th. Lincoln’s very humble origins and his rise from log cabin to the White House make him the ultimate exemplar of the American Dream. His immortal achievements against forbidding obstacles amidst the epic national agony of Civil War and slavery, his eloquence as the supreme spokesman and statesman of democracy, ending in his assassination at the moment of victory, and his subsequent apotheosis in marble inside the American Parthenon on the National Mall, make it difficult now to imagine that Lincoln once was indeed a living person.

In reviewing some of the portrayals of Lincoln on the movie screen, it is noteworthy that most of these appeared before World War II, in the 1920s and ‘30s, when there were still surviving Civil War veterans; these films are no farther from the Civil War than we are today from the period when they were produced.

Hollywood of course was far different in those days from the anti-America, radical (and cinematically compromised) propaganda machine it often is today. We should not underestimate the part played by its many historical films of the pre-World War II period in furthering assimilation into American culture of the millions of immigrants who had entered our country before the mid-1920s. Today, instead, in the schools, libraries and popular culture we have the centrifugal forces of multiculturalism for newer immigrants replacing the old patriotic assimilation; the purveyors of the “multi-cult” use it to further their hostile agenda toward our country and indeed Western civilization.

The first big film to depict Lincoln is not exactly a model for assimilation, but The Birth of a Nation (1915), i.e. the Confederacy, should be mentioned because of its reputation and its significance as the movie that first put together – on a vast imaginary historical canvas -- all the basic techniques of filmmaking we know today. Directed by the father of film direction, D.W. Griffith, Lincoln (Joseph Henabery) appears briefly in tableaus of famous events, such as his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Alas, the film, although brilliantly put together and still powerful from a cinematic point of view, embodies the myth of “The Lost Cause.” Many Americans – north as well as south ---forgot the moral issues of the war, allowing them by the 1890s to be replaced by the desire for national reconciliation, healing and remembrance. Griffith was born in rural Kentucky in 1875 and heard the myth-making first hand as a child on the knees of Confederate veterans. The movie is infused with his blatant racism (especially in its Reconstruction section) and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the romantic melodrama conventions of the late nineteenth century, making it exceedingly controversial from the time of its release: It provoked riots in some northern cities, some scenes were cut by government censors in northern states, and it inspired the founding and early growth of the NAACP, which pushed for such censorship. Democrat “progressive” President Woodrow Wilson, however, praised the film as “history writ in lightening;” it may have been the first movie ever shown in the White House. Wilson was a college classmate of Thomas F. Dixon, Jr., author of the book and play on which the movie was based, “The Clansman.” (Wilson also instituted segregation in federal employment at this time.)

Another silent film, The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln, was released in 1924, but little is known about it and it may be one of the many silent films that have been lost. We do know the scenario was written by one of the best writers in Hollywood, Frances Marion, so it may have been a worthy film.

Griffith gave Lincoln the full treatment in his first talking picture, Abraham Lincoln (1930). The great man is played by a distinguished actor with real presence, Walter Huston (probably best known to readers as the grizzled prospector eighteen years later in the Humphrey Bogart movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). Unfortunately, this birth to death opus suffers from the worshipful treatment typical of the time, as well as the slow, stilted “stageiness” found in most early talking pictures, especially pronounced here. Griffith’s poor direction of Huston and the cast in general may also reflect Griffith’s fading powers. Thus, when the newborn is shown to a boy in the cabin, he says, “Shucks. He’ll never amount to nothin’.” Then we are shown an hour glass with the sand beginning to fall through, with the superimposed title: “The Story of a Man Begins.” This is a bit dated even by 1930 standards, as is Huston’s theatrical makeup. The film dutifully takes us from Abe’s rail-splitting and courtship of Ann Rutledge all the way to his murder. It ends reverentially with the log cabin of his birth dissolving into the Lincoln Memorial – which had been dedicated only eight years earlier. This proved to be Griffith’s next to last film, and much of his remaining eighteen years were lost in drink and despair.

However, the film comes to life in one memorable scene which demonstrates the genius of the younger Griffith had not entirely disappeared: Sheridan’s Ride. This was the dramatic event on October 19, 1864 when Union troops were retreating in the Shenandoah Valley before the assault of Jubal Early’s Confederate cavalry. Notified of their impending debacle during a visit back in Winchester, Virginia, General Phil Sheridan and his aides gallop the twenty miles to the battle, where he rallies his bluecoats and turns a rout into a victory at the Battle of Cedar Creek (the site is preserved today as a national landmark). This sequence likely was filmed silent with the sound later synchronized (like the battle scenes in 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front). It has a freedom and flair typical of silent film, and Griffith in particular, at their considerable best. Sheridan’s gallop is thrilling, with some well-composed close shots of Sheridan and his steed. When he suddenly appears before his soldiers, they begin cheering and singing as he manfully rides his charger between their columns. This scene has such painstaking, incidental detail and realism – typical of the old Griffith – that it might almost be a contemporaneous newsreel of the event!

The feat earned Sheridan a dramatic picture on the cover of Harper’s Weekly and a poem of that name by Thomas Buchanan Read:

The first that the general saw were the groups
Of stragglers, and then the retreating troops;
What was to be done? what to do?--a glance told him both.
Then striking his spurs with a terrible oath,
He dashed down the line, 'mid a storm of huzzas,
And the wave of retreat checked its course there, because
The sight of the master compelled it to pause.
With foam and with dust the black charger was gray;
By the flash of his eye, and his red nostril's play,
He seemed to the whole great army to say:
"I have brought you Sheridan all the way
From Winchester down to save the day."

The scene is directed by Griffith as if inspired by these lines. (Too bad Read didn’t live longer – he would have been right at home in Hollywood!)

During this period one character actor, Frank McGlynn, often played President Lincoln, appearing as a secondary character and in movie shorts. McGlynn, born in 1866, was tall and straight, his face having some of the rough-hewn quality of Lincoln’s. Alas, he was not very good as Lincoln – playing one of Errol Flynn’s Scripture-quoting pirates in Captain Blood (1935) was more his speed. He plays President Lincoln opposite Shirley Temple’s “Littlest Rebel” in the 1935 movie of that title, kindly hearing her pleas to spare the life of her rebel father, a Union prisoner – which of course he does. He rather stiffly and poorly recites the Gettysburg Address in a 1930s short dramatizing that event. He also plays Lincoln in Cecil B. DeMille’s Western opus, The Plainsman (1936), with Gary Cooper. Earlier, Griffith cast McGlynn as Patrick Henry in his silent 1924 epic, America.

Public interest in Lincoln was particularly high in the twenties and thirties with publication of poet Carl Sandburg’s widely read, if often inaccurate, biography, The Prairie Years (1926) and his Pulitzer-prize winning The War Years (1939). In 1938 the popular playwright Robert E. Sherwood wrote the Pulitzer-prize winning hit play Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which won acclaim on Broadway with the superb character actor Raymond Massey taking Lincoln from his log cabin school up to his election in 1860. Sherwood saw Lincoln’s life as a parable of democracy, the spirit of which he wanted to re-kindle in the dark years leading up to World War II. The film version was released in 1940 with Massey and with a quality director, John Cromwell.

Although he is better than Huston, Massey’s Lincoln, acclaimed at the time, does not wear very well. He is physically quite believable in the part --tall, slender and rather gaunt -- but seen today he too is self-conscious and a bit stilted. This includes his attempted down-home accent. (Massey later played President Lincoln in shorter movie scenes, such as in How the West Was Won of 1962).

The film’s greatest interest is the staging of one of famous 1858 debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas (Gene Lockhart, a much respected character actor of the time, who is good in the part). The debate is staged in a town square with the candidates on a wood platform festooned with the Stars and Stripes, surrounded by hordes of boisterous spectators standing below them and watching from balconies. Not for the first time is Hollywood’s visual imagination and art direction for an historical subject the most worthy part of a film. Sherwood takes parts of Lincoln’s 1858 “House Divided” speech and other speeches to fashion Lincoln’s debate address. Surprisingly, Sherwood’s script for the film retains his frank view of the extreme difficulties Lincoln faced in his marriage to Mary Todd (Ruth Gordon). The film ends with Lincoln’s final address to the people of Springfield from the back of the train that is to take him off on his journey with destiny. The camera remains fixed as Lincoln, covered in his coat and shawl, and wearing his stovepipe hat, recedes into the distance. But the image does not come off as effectively as intended by Cromwell and Sherwood.

Now we come to the great John Ford’s treatments of Lincoln and his period. Ford’s first big film was the silent The Iron Horse (1924), a vast epic depicting construction of the Transcontinental Railroad from1862 until its completion in 1869, with the famous final gold spike hammered in at Promontory Summit, Utah in the presence of the presidents of the two railroad companies who built it, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific. Reaching across the wilderness from Omaha to Alameda, California, spanning rivers and plains and crossing the Rocky Mountains, built against the obstacles of extreme weather and hostile Indians, the Transcontinental Railroad was one of the greatest human and engineering feats of the nineteenth century. Ford tells the tale through the person of Davy Brandon (George O’Brien), effectively matching the personal and the epic. At the beginning of the film, we see the young Davy playing with his childhood friend Miriam (Madge Bellamy) in Springfield, Illinois as a certain local lawyer smilingly looks on -- Abraham Lincoln (Charles Edward Bull, who appears to have made only one other movie, in which he also is cast as Lincoln, The Heart of Maryland of 1927, taken from a Broadway play). Young Davy’s father is a surveyor and dreams of finding a 200-mile shortcut to build the transcontinental railroad. Later, the father is murdered and scalped by Indians, but Davy survives, to help realize his father’s dream. Now it is 1862 and President Lincoln is seen signing the legislation authorizing the land-grants and financing for construction of the railroad. Following a number of plot incidents involving rivalry and romance, plus Indian attacks and rowdiness from the immigrant laborers, Davy, now a Pony Express rider, finds the shortcut his father had discovered years earlier, saving the day and ensuring completion of the enterprise. Ourvast continent is tied as one, as the railroad revolutionizes settlement of the West.

The theme of epic conquest over the daunting obstacles of the wilderness, building the great nation that is the United States with brawn, initiative, courage, guts, hard work and sacrifice, was a common one in 1920s Westerns; others include The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Big Trail (1930), which starred twenty-three year-old John Wayne leading the pioneers across the wilderness to the promised land of California. What is notable in The Iron Horse is how Lincoln is drawn in at the beginning of the story to underline his part as a leading figure in this heroic epic of nation-building and of free enterprise. The 1862 legislation is one of the many achievements of the Civil War first Republican Congresses, arguably the greatest in our nation’s history.

Ford returned to the Lincoln period in 1936 with The Prisoner of Shark Island, a dramatization of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the Maryland doctor who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg during his escape following the assassination. Mudd (Warner Baxter) is torn from his family, tried as a conspirator with the others and sentenced to hard labor in forbidding Fort Jefferson prison off the coast of Florida, which seems to serve as the Devil’s Island of the USA. The film presents Mudd as an innocent victim, but the consensus today is that Mudd was indeed associated with the conspiracy. Our friend Frank McGlynn plays Lincoln, seated beside his wife in the box at Ford’s Theater, all the more effective because he is seen, not heard. (Mrs. Mudd is played by Gloria Stuart; sixty-one years later she played the elderly Kate Winslet character in Titanic.)

Ford’s direction of the murder is scrupulous and dramatic. Indeed, the veteran character actor Francis McDonald is so effective as Booth – struggling across the stage with his broken leg as he raises his fist shouting “Sic simper tyrannis” – that one almost thinks he is Booth. Seeming actually to be the historical character is the highest compliment one can bestow on an actor.

Ford dealt directly with Lincoln in 1939 with Young Mr. Lincoln, working with his favorite actor of this period of his career, Henry Fonda. This is the best of the films discussed so far and Fonda makes the best Lincoln. Written by a major Twentieth Century Fox screenwriter, Lamar Trotti, the film is largely a fictionalized account focusing on ten years of Lincoln’s life as an Illinois lawyer, climaxing with a murder trial where Lincoln successfully defends the underdog, using his homespun manner and humor to excellent effect. Perhaps because the writer and director could start from their imaginations, and undoubtedly also due to Ford’s genius as a director, the film is more spontaneous and natural than the others, avoiding their self-consciousness. Among the memorable scenes demonstrating Ford’s genius is Lincoln’s arrival in the town of Salem during its raucous Fourth of July festivities. (Ford excelled in making such small town scenes seem real.) Lincoln is seen standing with the crowd as the parade passes by; someone shouts, “Heroes of the Revolution!” and, as a carriage carrying several very elderly veterans of 1776 passes, Lincoln removes his stove pipe hat and lowers his head in solemn tribute. (Perhaps Trotti was drawing on Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum address, in which he spoke admiringly of the Revolution.) This simple, poetic movement, without dialogue, is vintage Ford. To further appreciate Ford’s visual subtlety, viewers may observe the differences in Lincoln’s manner when he is courting Ann Rutledge and his future wife, Mary Todd. With Ann, whom he dearly loves, as directed by Ford, Lincoln’s manner and movements are sincere and graceful, whereas with Mary, in the porch scene, he moves about hesitantly and stands beside her stiffly; for part of the scene Ford shoots them from behind, which he never does in the scenes with Ann. Finally, at the end, along a roadside a friend asks Lincoln, “Ain't you goin' back, Abe?” Lincoln replies, “ No, I think I might go on a piece... maybe to the top of that hill.” As he reaches the horizon, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is heard softly on the soundtrack and Lincoln waves good-bye, turning to walk off toward his destiny. Once again, Ford leaves us with a memorable visual image, one encapsulating the transcendent meaning of his film’s subject.

The final movie discussed here, Of Human Hearts (1938), gives us the best ever portrayal of Lincoln as president. (We are not covering television portrayals of Lincoln, such as those of Hal Holbrook and Sam Waterston.) This lovely film, based on fact, is the kind they just don’t and couldn’t make anymore. It is about a poor but ambitious boy’s conflict with his severe parson father in pre-Civil War rural Ohio. Upon reaching his later teens, the boy, Jason Wilkes (young James Stewart), with the financial help of his ever-devoted mother (Beulah Bondi), runs away to enroll in medical school (where he is befriended by a student played by our Stephen Douglas from earlier, Gene Lockhart). He returns, too late, when his father (Walter Huston again, in a perfect role for him) dies, but is present to see how beloved he was by his parishioners, who follow behind the hearse in a long, long line of mourners in a heavy rainstorm. His mother asks Jason, “Now do you think your father was a failure?”

The war comes and Jason, now a doctor, becomes a respected Army surgeon. But amidst his successes, he has forgotten about his poor mother. Whereupon, much to his amazement, Dr. Wilkes is summoned from the front to the White House for an interview with President Lincoln. The great character actor John Carradine plays Lincoln. (A member of John Ford’s “stock company,” Carradine plays Mudd’s sadistic jailer in The Prisoner of Shark Island and the lay preacher Casey in Ford’s film of The Grapes of Wrath.)

Cleverly, director Clarence Brown introduces the great man from behind, seated in his chair at his desk. Then he stands, turning toward the camera, looking down on the seated Jason, his hands holding the lapels of his suit. He begins to speak, not loudly or emphatically, but almost quietly; yet he also is firm. He questions Jason about his work as a surgeon, which he understands has been highly praised. Following this almost soft beginning, Lincoln begins to sound steely, as he inquires how Jason managed his way through medical school (his mother sold the family possessions and sent him the money). Jason confesses he has forgotten about his mother. Then Lincoln reveals that Mrs. Wilkes has written him, the President, a letter asking for his assistance in finding Jason’s grave – not having heard from him for so very long, she thinks he is dead. Lincoln now delivers to the shamed Jason a brief but devastating dressing down and lecture on appreciating his mother. He grants the now guilt-stricken Jason leave and, slapping the table with his hand, orders Jason to return to Ohio and make things right with his mother. This is just how we might imagine Lincoln handling such a situation. The scene may sound corny, but it is brilliantly directed with great understatement by the accomplished Brown. And as with Young Mr. Lincoln, the fictitiousness of this scene helps the filmmakers and the actor make it more natural and believable. When this movie opened at the palatial Capitol Theater on Broadway in New York City in 1938, Lincoln’s appearance was greeted with applause by the audiences. How times have changed.

Might we have a new portrayal of Lincoln to look forward to? For several years Steven Spielberg has been working on an ambitious adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s scholarly work of history, Team of Rivals, with Liam Neeson mentioned as Lincoln. The project has been postponed repeatedly, perhaps due to the extraordinary difficulty of adapting such a work of history into a movie drama. Whether Spielberg has the artistic and intellectual maturity, and talent, to bring off such a daunting project remains to be seen.

At this point, two hundred years on with Lincoln, young and old alike will have to rely mainly on the written word to understand and imagine our sixteenth president as he actually was. But we still have a few movies and superb actors of the past to help us along.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattlelineOnline's media critic.