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Lincoln on Film
| Article
# : |
10383 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,028 Words |
| Author
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Frank Thompson
Frank Thompson is the associate producer of Wild Bill
Wellman: A Hollywood Maverick, which airs this spring on
Turner Network Television. He is the author of Lost Films,
recently published by Citadel Press, and William A.
Wellman. |
In director John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), our first glimpse of the Great Emancipator is as a gangly youth dressed in homespun clothes, rough boots, and suspenders. As he sits waiting for a fellow Whig candidate to finish a flowery speech on the porch of a general store, Abe (played by Henry Fonda) leans back in a chair, writing on a slate. Introduced, he untangles his long legs, slowly walks into the light, awkwardly fumbles for a place to put his hands, and then looks out solemnly at the small crowd. "Gentlemen and fellow citizens," he says. "I presume you all know who I am."
They do. And so do we. Even before he introduces himself as "plain Abraham Lincoln" we recognize the deepset eyes, prominent, slightly misshapen nose, broad forehead. Lincoln's is a face seemingly created to be carved into stone, impressed onto coins, engraved on currency. It is a primal landscape, one that every American recognizes. We know who he is because, in addition to the countless books written about him, there have been at least two hundred films in which he has been portrayed, and nearly as many television productions. What the photographs by Matthew Brady and others did for Lincoln's image in the last century, the movies have done for the twentieth century; his features are forever burned into our national consciousness.
Ironically, it was this monumental image of Lincoln that made Fonda resist taking the part. Ford called the actor into his office. "He looked at me for a long while," Fonda recalled. "Suddenly he sprang up and said, 'What's all this bullshit about you not wanting to play Abraham Lincoln? You're not playing the Great Emancipator! You're playing a jack legged lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, a gawky kid still wet behind the ears who rides a mule because he can't afford a horse.' I couldn't believe it. But he was right. He was making me see the character for what he was. I had him on too high a pedestal."
Most of the filmmakers who have brought Lincoln to the screen from 1903 to the present have had similar trouble with that pedestal. Some, like Ford, could see the character clearly enough to go past the marble statue in the public's mind. Others many others have been content to dress an actor up in the accepted Lincoln Memorial style and let him pose in tableaux.
Lincoln Actors
Several actors have specialized in playing the part. Ralph Ince was one of the first, playing Honest Abe in at least a dozen films, from Under One Flag
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