Abraham Lincoln on the Silver Screen
Why the Time May be Right for a Film About the 16th President
Feb 16, 2009
When director D.W. Griffith ventured beyond silent films and into the sound era, he chose as his first subject not a lavish spectacle or an intimate melodrama, but a portrait of an American president. Abraham Lincoln (1930) starred Walter Huston as the Great Emancipator in a film full of factual errors. Always the trend setter, Griffith's film went a long way towards establishing the biopic as a popular form, focusing on significant episodes in Lincoln's life and embracing the dramatic flair of exaggeration by centering much of the story around a fictionalized romance. Though not very successful, it predicted a wave of Lincoln films that washed over the next decade.
Lincoln in the Age of Doubt
During the 1930s not a year went by without a film that dealt with Lincoln. Firmly entrenched in the Great Depression, America's massive cinema audiences turned to stories set amidst their last national crisis. As the presidency was passed from Herbert Hoover to Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, Lincoln became a figure from the past whose personal story of ascending from humble origins to lead the nation out of civil war inspired and energized Americans.
This trend reached its apotheosis late in the decade with John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). One of the most original of the Lincoln films, if not among the greatest, it starred Henry Fonda as a pre-presidential Lincoln, plying his down-home legal skills in the service of the wrongfully accused. In 1940 John Cromwell directed the film adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's acclaimed stage play Abe Lincoln in Illinois with Raymond Massey reprising the title role and earning an Academy Award nomination.
Massey (and others) would portray Lincoln in later films, but the onset of World War II and the violent reshaping of the film industry in the years that followed left Lincoln biopics in their wake.
Lincoln in the Age of Hope
Now a self-proclaimed shift is again underway in American society. The uncertainty of the '30s is commonly cited with regards to the economic, security, and ethical questions that dominate the national political discourse in the early 21st century. Yet, to this point, the predominant media image of Lincoln is the amusing fellow in the tall hat, more at home promoting a Presidents' Day sale than inciting hope.
The election of Barack Obama, another unlikely upstart from Illinois, drew all the inevitable comparisons and may have tipped the scales in the direction of a renewed interest in Lincoln on-screen. Steven Spielberg's long-discussed Lincoln, to star Liam Neeson, refuses to disappear as a topic of speculation. As tomorrow's tendencies remain unknown, it is likely that this is the time for Spielberg and his inevitable emulators to present American (and international) audiences with their own tellings of the Abraham Lincoln story. If the past is any guide, such films could take advantage of a collective mood and perhaps even provide a measure of historical perspective for the citizens of an ever-tumultuous world.
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