Martin Edlund: A 1939 film about Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's long limbs and saturnine features have lately been stretched out on the psychotherapist's couch. The cover to last October's Atlantic Monthly considered "Lincoln's Great Depression" (an excerpt from Joshua Wolf Shenk's book Lincoln's Melancholy). Applying modern clinical diagnoses to the historical record, Shenk found him to be a severe manic depressive with suicidal tendencies. Peeking into his medicine cabinet, he noted a pharmacopeia of opiates, sarsaparilla, cocaine, and mercury pills. Last month, a lavishly promoted three-hour film on the History Channel (seen by some 2.8 million households) pressed the case further, dwelling on Lincoln's premonitions of his own death, his inferiority complex, and his likely--at least in Gore Vidal's view--homosexuality.
It is into this thicket of psychobabble that John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln strides--long-legged, loose-limbed, and a hundred feet tall. The 1939 film is being issued for the first time on DVD today by the Criterion Collection. Ford's portrait of the man couldn't be more at odds with the present one. Warming up for his role as Tom Joad in Ford's Grapes of Wrath the next year, Henry Fonda played Lincoln as Honest Abe rather than Great Emancipator. In fact, the film is less a biopic than a series of character studies drawn in the loose, quick lines of folk legend. And it's as much a reflection of Ford's age as the neurotic Lincoln is a reflection of our own.
Shaken by the Great Depression, America looked inward and backward, finding solace and pride in a recaptured past. The great subject of the day was America itself, particularly its avatar the "common man," who was celebrated in oral history and folk song, agrarian photography and documentary prose, social theater and proletarian fiction. Some of it was genuinely radical, but most simply romantic and self-affirming. No figure captured the mood and moment so well as Abe Lincoln. He became the decade's most prominent and malleable symbol. The Republicans embraced him as an exemplar of self-reliance. Communist Party presidential candidate Earl Browder, meanwhile, claimed that it was "left to the Communist Party to revive the words of Lincoln." He was equally ubiquitous in the arts. In addition to Ford's film, Lincoln's life was the basis for major works by Carl Sandburg, D.W. Griffith, and Robert E. Sherwood. "More than a leader," wrote Alfred Kazin of Lincoln in the 1930s, "the people's legend of him now seemed the greatest of all American works of art." Lincoln's Great Depression indeed. ...
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It is into this thicket of psychobabble that John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln strides--long-legged, loose-limbed, and a hundred feet tall. The 1939 film is being issued for the first time on DVD today by the Criterion Collection. Ford's portrait of the man couldn't be more at odds with the present one. Warming up for his role as Tom Joad in Ford's Grapes of Wrath the next year, Henry Fonda played Lincoln as Honest Abe rather than Great Emancipator. In fact, the film is less a biopic than a series of character studies drawn in the loose, quick lines of folk legend. And it's as much a reflection of Ford's age as the neurotic Lincoln is a reflection of our own.
Shaken by the Great Depression, America looked inward and backward, finding solace and pride in a recaptured past. The great subject of the day was America itself, particularly its avatar the "common man," who was celebrated in oral history and folk song, agrarian photography and documentary prose, social theater and proletarian fiction. Some of it was genuinely radical, but most simply romantic and self-affirming. No figure captured the mood and moment so well as Abe Lincoln. He became the decade's most prominent and malleable symbol. The Republicans embraced him as an exemplar of self-reliance. Communist Party presidential candidate Earl Browder, meanwhile, claimed that it was "left to the Communist Party to revive the words of Lincoln." He was equally ubiquitous in the arts. In addition to Ford's film, Lincoln's life was the basis for major works by Carl Sandburg, D.W. Griffith, and Robert E. Sherwood. "More than a leader," wrote Alfred Kazin of Lincoln in the 1930s, "the people's legend of him now seemed the greatest of all American works of art." Lincoln's Great Depression indeed. ...