Lincoln at the Movies
Lincoln at the Movies - the Chronicle Review - the Chronicle of Higher Education
When John Ford first asked Henry Fonda to play Lincoln, the actor said no. “I can’t play Lincoln. That’s like playing God,” he explained. “You’re thinking of the Great Emancipator,” responded the director. “This is the jack-legged lawyer from Springfield.” Fonda relented, and the result was Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), the best film ever made about Lincoln—until now.
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln both overturns a century of cinematic portrayals of the 16th president of the United States and challenges a decades-long scholarly, if not popular, vision of him as halfhearted and reluctant in his efforts to eradicate slavery. Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t just portray Lincoln, he inhabits him, giving us not a stick figure but a beleaguered leader whose crafty political genius leads to passage of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. The film restores for our time a vision of Lincoln as a tireless opponent of slavery and, in the process, speaks to the political problems we face as a nation today.
The most important films on historical topics have always been tied to cultural moments, shaping and revealing assumptions about the past. None, of course, has been more controversial than The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith’s silent film about the Civil War and Reconstruction. President Woodrow Wilson supposedly described it as like “writing history with lightning.”
That film is remembered for its second part, which made heroes of white Southern Klansmen “protecting” themselves against radicals and blacks. The less frequently discussed first part offers a portrait of Lincoln (played by Joseph Henabery, who had a long career as a director). There is no reference to Lincoln as an emancipator; rather, he is a friend of the South, whose assassination, depicted in the film, removes his “fostering hand” from the process of Reconstruction.
Griffith came back to Lincoln 15 years later for Abraham Lincoln (1930). It remains the only biopic that attempts to cover the president’s life in its entirety. Played by Walter Huston, from a script co-written by the poet and novelist Stephen Vincent Benét, Lincoln is a man of great physical strength, self-deprecating humor, paralyzing melancholy, and deep ambition. Much is made of his early life, particularly his love for the doomed Ann Rutledge. Once we arrive at the Civil War, slavery is barely mentioned. The theme of Lincoln’s life is that the Union must be preserved, an aphorism stated repeatedly. Griffith reprises the vision of Lincoln as great reconciler. As the war nears its end he says, “I shall deal with them as if they had never been away.”