Peter Bogdanovich said that watching a John Ford movie, you get a sense of what the earth is made of. Watching YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, you get a sense of the legends America is made of. YOUNG MR. LINCOLN is pure American legend, and I mean that as a big compliment. Henry Fonda is astounding as Honest Abe, portraying him as a salt-of-the-earth fellow who is sincere and charismatic, and uses his best traits to find justice in a strange trial in small town in his early days as a lawyer. The account is fiction, but Ford makes it American myth. Every shot in the movie is impeccably composed, Ford’s love of Americana in art permeates every frame. I’m not sure how trials played out back in Lincoln’s days as a lawyer, but the trial scenes don’t seem authentic…but to criticize this movie for that is missing the point. It’s a great mythological portrait of the early days of one of America’s greatest presidents, one doesn’t see movies with a taste like this anymore…the closest thing I can think of in recent memory is HBO’s excellent JOHN ADAMS mini-series. I look forward to drinking up other John Ford films in the future.
The second of three great films released by John Ford in 1939, Hollywood’s most famed year, preceded by “Stagecoach” and followed by “Drums Along the Mohawk”, this slice of Americana perfection posits the Great Emancipator in the dusty town of Springfield, Illinois, years before any notion of a presidential run, as a green lawyer defending two innocent brothers from a lynch mob and a murder wrap. As young Abe, Ford casts Henry Fonda for the first time, looking eerily like the famous rail-splitter with a prosthetic nose and top hat, giving the kind of sensitive and sly performance the director would come to rely on seven more times over the next two decades. As a bonus feature on Criterion’s top notch double-disk, a BBC interview with Fonda tells of his reluctance to take the part, but was persuaded by Ford who suggested playing the role not as the legendary presidential figure, but as a naïve kid looking to make a name for himself as a lawyer in a town full of blowhards and drunken hotheads; a fine persuasion, it’s one of Fonda’s most recognizable parts, quick witted, brooding and soulful, the prototypical Fordian hero.
