Young Mr. Lincoln is one of those sneaky films you find yourself discussing hours later. It's deceptive like that. For example, you've never seen Fonda looking like this, that makeup (Ford harangued Fonda into playing Lincoln - the latter thought he was too much like a deity - Ford had to remind him he's playing the young 'jack-leg' lawyer). And his height, and way of walking - I kept thinking of Raymond Massey in Arsenic and Old Lace, or Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. In an incredibly weird coincidence, George Clooney, who starred in the next film we watched, is a descendant of Lincoln's mother Nancy Hanks. (Ed. Hanks? Sure you don't mean Tom Hanks?)
Like all the best Fords, it feels episodic, but blends into a tremendous whole. For example, that incredible opening when he's chatting to his sweetheart, and in the very next scene, she's already dead. And that bit where the townsfolk ask what he knows about being a lawyer and he replies "Not enough to get me into trouble". And that great moment where the forward southern dame tells him he's a terrible dancer and invites him outside to talk - and when they're out there Lincoln sees his river and it reminds him of his gal and there's not a word spoken (quiet simplicity is very much a Fordian trait). And where he stops the mob. And selecting the jury - the drunk man who admits he's lied is accepted as an honest man. And that take where Lincoln rounds on witness Ward Bond that he's the real killer - one take - there's a cut in it but I bet it's not because that one take wasn't great - everything in the shot. And that scene at the end where Carrie Sue (Judith Dickens) kisses him - actually we didn't even know they were there, they appear after Ma's horse and cart have moved out of shot - and says something like "I don't know how I couldn't have kissed you", and then, as though spontaneously, she and her beau just run off.
As Q said, it's a film we'll be watching over and over again. I LOVE Ford. He's so goddam SUBTLE.
Ma is Alice Brady. What? Yes, the mother in My Man Godfrey. She was 46 and died that year of cancer. Ann Rutledge plays Lincoln's first love, Marjorie Weaver the southern lass, Richard Cromwell and Eddie Quillan the brothers and Arleen Whelan and Dorris Bowdon their girls and Ward Bond the witness. With Donald Meek, Edwin Maxwell.
Ford. "Everybody knows Lincoln was a great man, but the idea of the picture was to give the feeling that even as a young man you could sense there was going to be something great about this man. I had read a good deal about Lincoln, and we tried to get some comedy into it too, but everything in the picture was true. Lamar Trotti was a good writer and we wrote it together.
PB: That thunderstorm at the end very much gave a sense of Lincoln's future.
Ford: That was another one of those things we had to make up on the spot. There was a real thunderstorm, so I said 'Let's have him walk away, and then we'll dissolve into the statue at the Lincoln Memorial."
Fonda did three Ford films that year back-to-back: this in the spring, Drums Along the Mohawk in the summer and The Grapes of Wrath in the autumn. For the record, Peter Bogdanovich's favourite Fords are Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, Wagon Master, The Searchers, The Wings of Eagles, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
The music's by Alfred Newman, photography by Bert Glennon.
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