Young Mr. Lincoln
Screening on Film
Directed by John Ford.
With Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver.
US, 1939, 35mm, black & white, 101 min.
With Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver.
US, 1939, 35mm, black & white, 101 min.
Another Ford undisputed masterpiece, and perhaps the best fictionalized biography film ever made: Cahiers du cinema devoted a whole theoretical issue to unraveling this movie’s complicated ideology. What can one say? Henry Fonda with top hat and putty nose and bashful sincerity and inconsolable sadness over the death of Ann Rutledge, is Abe Lincoln. It is that early period of his life when Lincoln wasn’t quite ready to climb that hill toward destiny in Washington, D.C. When Fonda’s long-legged Lincoln rides through town on a donkey, it feels like one has stepped into history. Montages? One of the greatest in cinema, Griffith-like, occurs as the river turn to ice at Anne’s grave site.
