Young Mr. Lincoln

1939 Lincoln movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Lincoln, before his political career, defends a pair of brothers on a murder charge.

This must have been before Lincoln's vampire-hunting days.

Like everything else I've been watching from 1939, this suffers a bit from being exactly what you'd expect it to be. It's exactly what you'd expect a 1939 movie about Abraham Lincoln to be. It idealizes him, lays the heroism on mighty thick, and starts with a sentimental tone with this mother-as-ghost stuff. There's more constant music and all this artificially homey dialogue, and hints of the future romance between Lincoln and Mary Todd shoehorned in.

If you watch Abraham Lincoln biopics like most people watch pornographic material or if you're the type of person who goes to that Mr. Skin website to find out the exact moment when a certain actress is going to disrobe, here's what you need to know:

You get your Abraham Lincoln hat money-shot at the 14-minute mark. And yes, it's extraordinary.

I do like how John Ford takes his time with some of this story and focuses only on a brief moment in Lincoln's life rather than trying to bite off a bigger chunk and making a four-hour film or something. We get to see Lincoln as a pie-eating judge, taking part in a rail-splitting competition, and even cheating during a tug-of-war match. Sure, Ford and Fonda's Lincoln is almost mythic at times and in certain shots, but he's also humanized here. And I learned a lot about the historical figure!

1) Red hair got him horny.
2) He went into law because of a stick. Or gravity. Or a combination of a stick and gravity.
3) He played a pretty mean Jew's harp.
4) He had a short and portly sidekick with a coonskin cap. The whistling-and-Jew's-harp duet they perform on horseback was pretty special.
5) He liked to prop his feet up and lean back in chairs, the kind of thing that would cause him to lose the use of a good chair in my mom's house.
6) Lincoln had some jokes!
7) And as I already said--Lincoln didn't play tug-of-war fairly. I imagine this sort of scandal would have been equivalent to something in the 21st Century running for president and having a recording surface where he talked about grabbing women "by the pussy" or something. 19th Century America was awfully serious about their tug-of-war.