Movie:“Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939)

Henry Fonda at a young Abraham Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's new movie "Lincoln" is opening this week. Therefore, it's a good time to look back on Director John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" from 1939. Richard Brody of the New Yorker writes:

Abraham Lincoln loomed large in the imagination of the director John Ford, as seen in the 1939 drama “Young Mr. Lincoln” (which I discuss in this clip), an ingeniously tight-focussed yet historically resonant view of the future President’s rise to prominence.In his biography of Ford, Joseph McBride runs through the remarkable number of references to Lincoln throughout Ford’s filmography and quotes Peter Bogdanovich about the elderly Ford speaking of Lincoln with “such an extraordinary sense of intimacy in his tone… that somehow it was no longer a director speaking of a great President, but a man talking about a friend.”....

Perhaps no filmmaker bore the burden of historical consciousness as deeply, as seriously, and as humanly as Ford did; his “friendship” with Lincoln had a firm artistic basis.

Click on the link for a nice video about the movie:

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/11/dvd-of-the-week-young-mr-lincoln.html#ixzz2CD3r6ZiM

John Ford set the standard.

Review of the new "Lincoln" movie:

http://www.gazette.net/article/20121114/ENTERTAINMENT/711149850/1149/-lincoln-a-political-animal-of-a-different-kind&template=gazette