Abraham Lincoln

If Griffith had stuck to Lincoln's personal life, this could have been an interesting, amusing, and occasionally insightful film. Griffith gives us a multi-layered and largely accurate portrait of Lincoln the man. We see the ungainly country lawyer, countrified in speech and manner, often serious, even melancholy, but with a rare ability to find humor in the most unlikely places and to laugh even at himself. We see Lincoln the inveterate story-teller, the insomniac, the doting father, the determined commander-in-chief the patient husband. If this had been the whole of the film, it would have been easy to overlook its painfully outdated style and to forgive its frequent omissions and exaggerations as poetic license.

Unfortunately, the film necessarily includes Lincoln's political life, and here it moves from poetic license to outright falsehood. Slavery was the central issue of Lincoln's political career, a fact that Griffith tries to obscure, going so far as to turn Lincoln's pivotal 'House Divided' speech into an argument against secession. This is particularly ironic since it was really Lincoln's battle cry against encroaching slavery. When South Carolinians seceded two years later, this was the speech they pointed to as proof that when Lincoln took office, "the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government ... and the Federal Government will have become their enemy."

During Lincoln's presidency, the question of slavery occupied much of his time and attention, yet again Griffith chooses to ignore it. His Lincoln spends more time admiring the courage of Confederate soldiers than worrying about slavery. Even the Emancipation Proclamation gets only the briefest attention. Lincoln reads a line from the document, signs it, and says, "Well, gentlemen, it is done." It's oddly dismissive, coming from a man who considered emancipation the central act of his presidency and the most meaningful act of his life.

Denied his opposition to slavery and concomitant commitment to democracy and the inalienable rights of man, Lincoln is reduced to endlessly repeating, "The Union must be preserved." Why it must be preserved is left to the audience's imagination. The film never gives us the slightest clue.

Before writing this review I saw that publicity driven line about this film. Abraham Lincoln is a lot of things, but NOBODY ever accused him of being a great romantic. All I can say there is, Huh?

Abraham Lincoln is one of two sound films made by movie pioneer, David W. Griffith. It's also something of an atonement for Griffith who was accused fostering racism with his masterpiece silent work, The Birth of a Nation.

Maybe if Abraham Lincoln had been a better film it would have succeeded in being an atonement. It certainly had one of the best interpreters of Lincoln ever in Walter Huston. The film also in many ways looks like a newsreel of the Civil War era. Our image of that era and you can see it in Ken Burns documentary comes from Matthew Brady's still photographs. In crafting this and The Birth of a Nation, Griffith was heavily influenced by Brady's still photographs.

Lincoln's prarie years were better told in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Young Mr. Lincoln. Griffith should have stuck to the war years and made it in fact the Lincoln family story. One thing that would have done is eliminated Una Merkel as Ann Rutledge. Una Merkel had many a good role as a wisecracking dame in modern films. But in Abraham Lincoln she's just awful as Lincoln's lost love Ann Rutledge. It's a miracle she had a career after this film and a good one.

I think it qualifies as a must-see film for all true scholars of the cinema. That is not to say that it is a good film. It is most certainly not. But this is really a perfect film in which to study the biggest change that this artistic medium ever experienced, the change from silence to sound. The whole film comes off as so, so awkward. It doesn't help that the script is awful. The film is actually over-ambitious, trying hard to cover the entire life of Abe, from birth to death. However bad Abraham Lincoln is, though, I myself found it more than watchable and always fascinating. 6/10.

This film was to be D.W. Griffith's big comeback production, and it did very well for "the old master." In fact, it was chosen as number two of the Ten Best Pictures of 1930 by The Film Daily, just below "All Quiet On The Western Front!" Sadly, due to the horrible condition of the available prints of this film, no really fair analysis can be made today. As with so many early talkies, Abraham Lincoln is now a sickly shadow of what it was in 1930. To begin with, it's original running time is listed at approximately 96 minutes. The version presented on Laserdisc runs 83 minutes.The film shows signs of wear and duping. The soundtrack is horribly distorted and, in several scenes, seems to be missing totally, replaced by terrible music from a stock library. Even so, if one can look past these things and take the acting style in the context of its time, one can see that Griffith had not lost his flair and would have probably continued directing had the fates (and probably Hollywood) not conspired against him. There are wonderful cinematic moments, reminiscent of some of his earlier triumphs. This is a film that cries out for restoration but, alas, there is most likely little or nothing left to restore. UPDATE: In 2008, KINO International released a DVD version of Abraham Lincoln that is far more complete than the old Laserdisc I reviewed from in 1998. While some soundtrack from the Prologue is still missing, KINO has made up for it by adding subtitles for the missing dialogue. Also, the picture quality is far superior to anything else available. It is evident that much effort went into making this forgotten film much more watchable and available!

This being a presidential election year made me curious about this early talkie. I had seen it before but it's been a while and so I wanted to actually go through a diagnosis of the movie itself. So I dragged out an old A&E VHS made copy. Griffith had tackled the Booth assassination of Lincoln before in the silent Birth of A Nation. Here he did it in sound and Ian Keith is great as John Wilkes Booth: "S-I-C T-E-M-P-E-R T-Y-R-A-N-N-I-S... As he yells after he shoots Lincoln at Ford's theatre and jumps onto the stage. And Walter Huston is much more Lincolnesque than Henry Fonda would be ten years later. Also the scene where Lincoln & U.S. Grant are conversating over cigars was kind of priceless. Una Merkel is compelling in an early film performance as Lincoln's first wife Ann Rutledge.

This was Griffith's first sound film and he shows a somewhat uneasiness with the new medium but what director didn't in 1930. Griffith faired better than most. If you can look past the oldness of the film you'll see that this is pretty much a straight forward & accurate & well made(by 1930 standards) telling of the events of Lincoln's life. The sort of way Masterpiece Theatre would later tell stories episodically over many hours decades later. Griffith shows an aptitude for shooting that had already happened in the late silents of Hollywood. He makes quality use of the moving camera. Roving in and out of some scenes. The shot where the soldiers are fighting in trenches during the Civil War are similar to the same kind of shot Lewis Milestone did in All's Quiet On the Western Front which also came out in 1930. But even both of these films hark back to Griffith's own scene in Birth of A Nation where the South is battling the North and the Colonel jumps out of the trench to stoke a cannon.

This was not Griffith's first experiment with sound. He had shot some experimental dialogue scenes for his 1921 feature Dream Street. A short 1921 intro to Dream Street with Griffith talking up the film still exists as well as a 1930 sitdown interview with Huston promo-ing Abraham Lincoln. But Abraham Lincoln showed a 'newer' Griffith. Moving away from the static camera of which he was famous and adopting a more fluid style which was recently introduced by some German directors. Griffith even this late still liked old fashioned 19th century melodrama stories. Lincoln's life story is certainly a subject he could sink his teeth into. He had done bits and parts of Lincoln's life before particularly the Ford's Theatre scene in BoAN. Abraham Lincoln is Not necessarily a great film nor the best of 1930 but a very interesting foray into sound by a great film pioneer and like mentioned before a lot of the Lincoln life is covered quite surprisingly well.