Young Mr. Lincoln
Tonight is the third of our eight weeks devoted to the cinema of John Ford. The film is Young Mr Lincoln, dating from 1939 and starring Henry Fonda as the young Abraham Lincoln during his early days in Illinois as a fledgling lawyer. In its frequent best moments, this is one of the most amazing films Ford ever made, and arguably the first to show his genius in its purest and most characteristic form. I would argue that it surpasses even the famous Stagecoach, the movie Ford had directed immediately before this. Stagecoach is still the more approachable film, and I’d imagine most people would prefer the robust enjoyments of its traditional plot and fast-moving action—not to mention John Wayne in the role that made him a star—to the unhurried, almost plotless poetics of Young Mr Lincoln, with its dreamy, minimalist central performance by Henry Fonda.
This movie mixes a lowbrow, populist folksiness and humour with a veil of hagiographic reverence wrapped so gracefully around the subject that it never seems forced or heavy. Lincoln—born in a log cabin as any American child can tell you—is a man of destiny who is drawn to books and the law, and to the higher calling of leadership, but who always has time to take part in the annual rail-splitting and pie-judging contests, and who’s never lacking for a homespun anecdote or funny story to illustrate his point. This refusal to put on airs, to consider himself any better than the meanest person in society, is contrasted to the blowhard oratory of established politicians and lawyers, and to the fancy houses and clothes of the the upper crust generally. You can see this in the very first scene of the picture, where the pomp and rhetoric of an incumbent congressman is contrasted with the incredibly relaxed directness of the inexperienced Lincoln. While his rivals Steven Douglas and the state prosecutor carry gold-headed canes, Lincoln is forever leaning back lazily in his chair with his feet up on a table. Very often he’s even ridiculous, a long stringbean of a man in an enormous stovepipe hat that makes him taller and leaner yet, looking silly riding into town on a mule or awkwardly trying to dance with the gentry.
And yet it’s from this averageness and ordinariness and plainness of speech and action that Lincoln’s transcendental qualities come. In fact there’s nothing whatever average or ordinary about Lincoln. Instead he’s the almost magical spiritual epitome of the American nation in its ideal form. As Lincoln’s greatness springs from his commonness, so does America’s greatness spring from its democratic levelling principles. As Lincoln’s lack of formal education and closeness to nature and folk-culture guarantee the authenticity of his insights, so does America’s frontier heritage and liberation from corrupt European history and culture guarantee its innocence and strength. So Lincoln, truly a man of the people, can become a leader so exalted that he is not merely respected but actually worshipped in American ideology, and in this film. Then also every viewer knows Lincoln’s ultimate destiny, which was to preside over and surmount the most dreadful crisis of American history and to bear that burden like a sacrifice—and finally of course to be assassinated for his actions. If you think there is something rather Christ-like in this story of humble origins, emergence into transcendental leadership, and sacrificial death, you’d be right—and we might remember that Christ rode into town on a donkey, too.
As I said before, there isn’t much plot movement in Young Mr Lincoln. Mostly there are episodes: Lincoln and his first love Ann Rutledge; Lincoln deciding to take up the law; Lincoln at the Independence Day fair; Lincoln stopping a lynch-mob; Lincoln at the ball with Mary Todd; and so on. Almost the whole of the last half of the film is taken up with Lincoln’s first trial, defending a pair of innocent young brothers from a murder charge. At times things move rather too deliberately, and the trial proceedings can seem repetitive and even banal.
But the true action of the film isn’t in this skeleton of plot. Instead it’s in those scenes where Lincoln communes with nature, or forges heartfelt bonds with the fatherless pioneer family whose sons he’s defending, or simply sits in a chair or rides down a road. In scenes like this we have the essence of American cinematic myth-making—and in Ford’s hands it’s a luminous and powerful enterprise. The unabashed poetry of the scenes by the river, with tree-branches dipping almost into the glowing waters, or of winding roads lined with rail fences, or (most electrifying of all) of the placement of Lincoln’s figure in a stripped-down, dramatically lit environment in the final scenes—these moments are amongst the most lyrical moments in the history of American cinema. Fully as well as any of his films, Young Mr Lincoln demonstrates Ford’s ability to do so much with so little, to convert the ordinary into the extraordinary and the everyday into the transcendental—and to do so while always keeping his feet on the ground.
Henry Fonda, here not too far from the beginning of his career, give a performance which in its simplicity and forthrightness even he never surpassed—and he certainly meets the daunting task of playing the most revered figure in American history more successfully than any of the other actors who’ve faced the role over the years. When Fonda initially refused to play a hero he himself had such overpowering respect for, Ford told him he wouldn’t be playing the Great Emancipator, but “a goddamn jake-legged lawyer in Springfield, Illinois.” Well, the jake-legged lawyer is there all right; but so is the Great Emancipator, just over the hill Lincoln goes up at the end of the film.
[screen movie]
Whenever I watch the last scenes of this movie—the scenes from the ending of the trial to the conclusion—I can feel the hairs coming up on the back of my neck. Lincoln’s tall figure isolated in the corridor outside the courtroom, framed for a moment in the light of the open door; then turning to face the unseen applauding crowd, with only the barest compositional features outlining his form, Ford’s low-angled camera subtly elevating and enlarging him—this is the purest kind of heroic cinema there can be. Then the following scenes on the roadside after his farewell to the Clay family are even more powerful. The branch of a tree swept by wind and illuminated by lightning flash, the lone figure on the road beside the beautifully winding rail fence—Lincoln now becomes a majestically solitary figure, leaving the events of the film and walking on and up into the events of American history and American ideology. The coming storm is the storm of the Civil War and Lincoln’s heroic and tragic destiny, and, clasping his stovepipe hat to his head, he will climb that hill and move from history into eternity—a movement that’s confirmed when the final shot dissolves to a kind of epilogue shot of the gigantic, utterly mythologized figure of the Lincoln Memorial. Not many filmmakers over the whole century of cinematic history could have mastered such a fantastic transition from the ordinary to the sublime, and with such sublimely simple means.
It’s worth pointing out how much the narrative of Lincoln presented in this film resembles the story of heroism and sacrifice that’s the centre of so many of Ford’s films. Lincoln is always presented here in terms of solitude and loss. He has, really, no friends—only the ragamuffin coonskin-capped companion who seems like a familiar rather than a comrade. His parents are dead, and especially the early loss of his beloved mother stamps Lincoln with the mark of melancholy and loneliness. It’s a mark whose impress is deepened when he loses Ann Rutledge, the only person who truly understands and encourages him. The scene where Lincoln talks to Ann’s tombstone is one of several such scenes in Ford’s films. It can seem hokey and overly sentimental, but it expresses the essential Fordian belief that the highest values are spiritual—not simply in the religious sense of a hereafter and a heavenly meeting of sundered souls, but in the sense that what we love and yearn for can have a place in our minds and hearts that’s deeper and more vivid than what actually surrounds us. It’s always this way in Ford. The glowing past, the glowing future, what’s beyond our reach because it’s lost or yet to come, has a luminous power and a commanding stature that surpasses anything that we can actually touch and hold.
So Lincoln’s career is bounded in every direction by loss. This is made explicit in the scene where he goes out to their log cabin to interview Abigail Clay about her sons. The cabin is like his own long-lost home, he says; Abigail is like his own dead mother; and Sara is like his dead sister Sara and Carrie-Sue like his dead lover Ann. All dead, all gone, and Lincoln left alone. And the loneliness of his personal life is mythically connected with the loneliness of his public life, his role as the man who will take the troubles of the nation upon his own shoulders, and will go to a solitary martyrdom to redeem his fellow-citizens. Here the equation is inescapable: loss is equal to value, loneliness and sacrifice are equal to greatness and service. It’s the ineffable we’re talking about here, the translation of the physical into the spiritual.
Again, though, we have to remember how Ford combines this spirituality with a physicality that’s so down-to-earth it’s even coarse, sometimes. The earthy humour of so many of the jokes is often distinctly low comedy. The informalities of social life in a town not so far removed from the frontier are underlined again and again by Ford, in the boisterous Independence Day celebrations, in the uncouthness of the citizenry and even the judge behind the bench, and in some of Lincoln’s own jokes (the “jack-ass” pun is an example). This combination of the earthy and the spiritual is something that distinguishes all of Ford’s most characteristic work, and we’ll see a lot of it as we progress through the films in this series. But there’s no better example of the transforming power of Ford’s touch than Young Mr Lincoln.