The movie was the tape we’d bought at Horton Plaza the night before: D. W. Griffith’s 1930 film Abraham Lincoln. I’d seen it in the early 1970’s (the time I really first discovered antique Hollywood; so many of my favorite films today are the ones I first saw camped out in my bedroom, watching the little TV on top of my filing cabinet, often until 2 or 3 in the morning) and I’d seen bits and pieces of it more recently on an Arts and Entertainment showing. I remembered being quite impressed by the film back in the 1970’s, and especially being impressed by Walter Huston’s performance as Lincoln — comparing him to the other Lincolns from Hollywood’s classic period, Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey, Huston seemed quite the best: authoritative, properly homely and physically clumsy (though at least some of the clumsiness was due to the elevator shoes Huston had to wear to raise himself to Lincoln’s height) but also convincing both as a frustrated lover (this movie endorses the historical legend that Ann Rutledge, played in an interesting bit of off-casting by Una Merkel, was the great love of Lincoln’s life) and as a war leader.
Later on, Harry Medved and Randy Lowell listed Abraham
Lincoln as one of the fifty worst films of
all time — in a book that seemed to take great joy in skewering the lesser
works of great directors (Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn also made the cut, right next to truly terrible
B-movies like Robot Monster), but
the rating of Lincoln — like that
of Ivan — is truly unfair to an
uneven but remarkable movie. True, Lincoln suffers from an almost unbearable stiffness, stemming partly from the
limitations of early sound technique (and Griffith’s clear discomfort with it —
one suspects his inability to adapt to sound was as much responsible for
Griffith’s inability to make movies after 1931 than the vague sense around
Hollywood’s producer community that he was “old-fashioned”) and partly from the
deliberately pageant-like style Griffith brought to this movie (as he had to
his pro-Southern take on the same historical material in The Birth of
a Nation, though the pageant-like approach
was less bothersome in a silent movie, with its inevitable breaks in visual
continuity for the intertitles). The actors all show off their stage credentials
by declaiming their lines, speaking slowly, distinctly and loudly in a way
aimed more at being heard in the balconies than being picked up by a
microphone; they assume stiff poses that keep them in range of the immobile
cameras; and they politely and patiently pause between each other’s lines, just
like they did in so many other early talkies. (As I noted to Bob R. when I ran
him The Threepenny Opera — the
1930 version — and the 1930 Dracula
within days of each other, European producers significantly led American ones
in the artful and fluid use of sound and the re-introduction of visual interest
in talking films.)
Now for the good news. Huston’s performance as Lincoln is
almost as good as I’d remembered it, probably still the best Lincoln on film (though
it seems unfortunate that Henry Fonda wasn’t able to repeat his performance as Young
Mr. Lincoln in a sequel or two that would
have continued Lincoln’s life to the end), and Una Merkel and Kay Hammond as
the two women in Lincoln’s life also stand out (it’s clear that David Selznick
must have screened this movie before he shot Gone With the Wind, and Vivien Leigh probably did, too; her Scarlett
O’Hara is strongly reminiscent of Hammond’s Mary Todd). Within the limits of
the style, actually, virtually all the cast members turn in excellent
performances, and Stephen Vincent Benét’s script (he was brought in to write
the film after Carl Sandburg, Lincoln’s biographer and Griffith’s and producer
Joseph Schenck’s first choice, turned it down) makes some embarrassing
historical glitches (like misquoting Lincoln’s famous “A house divided against
itself cannot stand” speech as “A house divided against itself must fall”) but,
for the most part, provides a sensitive framework that limns Lincoln’s life
with only a minor amount of dramatic license.
Most notable are two superb visual sequences (evidently shot
silent and post-synchronized) that show the kind of filmmaking Griffith still
felt most comfortable with. One is the very opening of the film: a dark, rainy,
stormy night in the woods of Kentucky, in which a mobile camera threads its way
through a dense forest of denuded winter trees to lead us to the log cabin
where Lincoln will be born (and his mother, Nancy Hanks, will die in
childbirth). The other occurs early on in the Civil War, after the Union defeat
in the first Battle of Bull Run led to fears that the Confederate Army would
actually conquer Washington. For a few minutes, this film comes vividly to life
in a series of well-chosen images, from a trumpet (shot up close with a
wide-angle lens) calling the troops together to defend Washington, followed by
shots of the Union Army massing, circling in parade formation and ultimately
charging to the defense of the beleaguered capital in criss-cross formations across
the screen. The ending is also a visually powerful moment; it repeats the
traveling shot through the Kentucky forest that began the film — only now the
weather is clear (symbolizing the end of the stormy period of American history
depicted in the film and the reunification of the country under Lincoln), and
when the camera gets to the now-deserted log cabin where Lincoln was born, the
scene dissolves to the Lincoln Memorial, with the sun rising over it (an artful
mix of actual footage and a model used for the traveling shot through the
Memorial to Lincoln’s statue), a beautiful bit of historical myth-making and a
visual statement of how far Lincoln came from humble origins to greatness. —
12/11/93
=====
Charles and I finally got together at around 7 (after I’d
left the house, hoping to find a haircut place open, and — unable to do that —
took the bus downtown and finished reading the book L.A.’s Secret Police by Mike Rothmiller and Ira Goldman), and we
distributed Zenger’s, came back
here to eat (at least I ate) and
then repaired to his place and ran the video of D. W. Griffith’s
Abraham Lincoln. Charles liked the movie,
even though he noticed the highly stilted quality of the acting and its overall
slowness (partly Griffith’s problem adjusting to sound, partly the limitations
of early sound moviemaking in general and partly, I suspect, a stylistic choice
on Griffith’s part to make the acting as pageant-like as possible). So much of
this movie takes place in Lincoln’s war office as he impatiently waits for
telegrams from the front to tell him whether the North is winning or losing the
Civil War that Charles said if somebody made a movie of the Bush Presidency in
the same style, the depiction of the Gulf War would be Bush sitting in the Oval
Office wringing his hands and watching CNN. Walter Huston is a credible
Lincoln, even though the six-inch stilts he wore to raise his own medium height
to Lincolnesque proportions are pretty obvious throughout the movie (in the one
scene in which he doesn’t wear
them — a scene in which he’s pacing the White House barefoot in a dressing-gown
— Huston is all too obviously six inches shorter than he is in the rest of the
movie), and the non-dialogue scenes (particularly the opening tracking shot
through the Kentucky forest to the log cabin in which Our Hero will be born,
and the magnificent montage scene of the Northern army mobilizing to defend
Washington, D.C.) are so much better than the rest of the movie they make it
all too clear the kind of moviemaking with which Griffith still felt most at
home. — 8/11/96
=====
For last night’s movie Charles and I watched a version of D.
W. Griffith’s first (of only two) sound films, the biopic Abraham Lincoln from 1930, which I thought would be an interesting
contrast to the two other films we’ve recently seen about Lincoln and the
aftermath of his assassination, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) and Robert Redford’s The
Conspirator (2010). (I’d also like to break
out the Ford at Fox box again and
watch the two films John Ford made about Lincoln and the aftermath of the assassination,
Young Mr. Lincoln and The
Prisoner of Shark Island.) Abraham
Lincoln was made at an unhappy juncture in
Griffith’s career; as James Agee noted in his 1948 article eulogizing Griffith,
technically he was the most advanced filmmaker of the late teens and early
1920’s but thematically he remained rooted in both the moral sentiments and the
storytelling devices of the late Victorian era, and as the 1920’s progressed
his movies seemed more and more out of touch with what contemporary audiences
wanted. In 1925 he lost his independent studio and his berth with United
Artists as one of its owner-producers, and he signed a contract with Paramount
to work as a studio director. His first assignment there was a novel called The
Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli — a
project originally assigned to Cecil B. DeMille and given to Griffith once
DeMille departed for a short-lived attempt at founding his own studio — and he also got socked with projects
like Sally of the Sawdust (1926),
a weird adaptation of W. C. Fields’ star-making musical Poppy whose stars were Fields, Carol Dempster (Griffith’s
girlfriend and later his second wife) and Alfred Lunt, a weird assortment of
talents indeed. For the rest of Griffith’s career — until 1931, when he made
his last film, an anti-alcoholism drama called The Struggle — he bounced back and forth between Paramount and
United Artists, now no longer as a UA part-owner but a contractee of UA
production chief Joseph M. Schenck. In 1929 Griffith shoehorned a few talking
sequences into a film he’d started as a silent, Lady of the
Pavements, and then he and Schenck had a
conference and the two of them decided that the way to launch Griffith’s sound
career would be to return to the subject of his most commercially successful —
and most infamous, then and now —
film, The Birth of a Nation: the
Civil War and its aftermath.
They concocted a Lincoln biopic and originally
approached Carl Sandburg to write the script because he’d already published his
epic six-volume biography of Lincoln, two volumes called The Prairie
Years and four called The War
Years (which would make it one volume per
year of the war). Sandburg turned it down, so they next offered the job to
Stephen Vincent Benêt, who’d also written about Lincoln before in other media,
though the final film credited associate producer John W. Considine with the
story and Benêt solo for “adaptation” and also co-credited with Gerrit Lloyd
for “continuity and dialogue.” (A lot of early talkies had similarly convoluted
writing credits; at one point the conventional wisdom was that just as silent
films had had different writers working out the continuity and adding the
titles, so sound movies would have different writers working out the continuity
and adding the dialogue. That changed when the producers started hiring
playwrights like George S. Kaufman, Ben Hecht, Charles McArthur and the
Mankiewicz brothers, Herman and Joe, who were used to doing both story
structure and dialogue in their
plays.) Abraham Lincoln is a
much-maligned film — it got listed by Harry Medved and Randy Lowell in their
1970’s book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (as did Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn and Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, though all three listings seemed to have had more
to do with the desire of Medved and Lowell to shock the film cognoscenti by attributing three of the worst films of all time
to three of the greatest directors of all time) — and yet, as problematic as it
is, it’s also absolutely haunting and does justice to its subject. Let’s deal
with the problems first: it’s very
slow-moving — despite the relentless compression needed to cram all of
Lincoln’s life into 90 minutes of running time (one example: Griffith cuts
directly from a scene in which a Northern political boss is approaching Lincoln
to run for President in 1860 to one in which Lincoln’s baggage tags are being
prepared for a train trip to Washington, D.C. and his wife, Mary Todd, crosses
out “Mr.” on the tag and writes in “President” instead) — and pageant-like in
the manner of George Arliss’s films from the period, especially his biopics. Griffith was pretty clearly intimidated
by the strictures of early-sound moviemaking, especially the difficulty of
shooting close-ups (which Griffith, though he hadn’t invented them, had
pioneered in his early years!) and the immobility of the cameras — but, as
Charles pointed out, he fought back by having the actors move around the set
and approach the cameras themselves.
Griffith and Schenck hired a first-rate
actor to play Lincoln, Walter Huston, but there was a problem with casting him:
he was considerably shorter than the real Lincoln, and given that Lincoln’s
unusual height was one of the big things everybody remembered about him (at
6’4” he remains our tallest
President ever — if John Kerry had been elected he would have tied Lincoln’s
record, and Barack Obama is one inch shorter) they couldn’t just ignore the
discrepancy the way Martin Scorsese did when he cast the 5’6” Leonardo DiCaprio
as the 6’4” Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Instead they gave Huston six-inch elevator shoes to wear throughout
the film — except in the scenes in which he goes barefoot (when Kay Hammond as
Mary Todd Lincoln upbraided him for going around barefoot so often, I thought,
“I shouldn’t wonder! He wants to
get out of those damned elevator shoes!”), and even then he might have been wearing fake feet over his real
ones to keep him at the same apparent height he is in the scenes where he’s
shod. The film contains a few scenes that were shot silent with sound dubbed in
later — notably armies massing and marching off to fight in the Civil War — and
those have so much more vitality than the rest of the movie it’s clear this was
still the sort of filmmaking that excited Griffith the most. I’ve seen Abraham
Lincoln in three different versions: the
first was on PBS in the mid-1970’s, when they showed a copy that began with a
silent shot of slaves enduring the Middle Passage and then dissolved into a
shot of the camera bearing down on the log cabin in Kentucky where Lincoln is
about to be born (and his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, is going to die in
childbirth). This was hailed as newly discovered footage but no other
information was given about the film’s provenance. The next time I saw it, it
was in a VHS public-domain pre-record that lacked the slave sequence and had a
set of normal 1930 opening credits (the PBS version had had new credits
superimposed over the shot of the slaves being shipped to the U.S.) which cut
directly to the tracking shot of the camera bearing down on the Lincolns’ cabin
(a very tacky-looking table-top
model — as is the scene of the Lincoln Memorial at the end; one wonders why a
major operation like United Artists couldn’t send a second unit to Washington,
D.C. and shoot at the real
Lincoln Memorial instead of assembling something representing it that looks
like a grade-school student made it for a school project) and ran about 75
minutes instead of the 90- to 96-minute version originally released.
This time it was in a modern restoration that revealed
that that mysterious shot of a slave ship in a fierce storm that had baffled me
way back when on PBS was part of an elaborate prologue in which both
Southerners and Northerners lament about what the other’s region is doing to
the country and pray for another George Washington to come along and reunite
the Union. Alas, the picture for this survives but the soundtrack does not (a
bit odd since the film was originally shot in the Movietone sound-on-film
process), so this version ran the footage without sound and had subtitles
explaining not only what the actors were supposed to be saying but also what
sounds — the slaves singing “Go Down, Moses” (when they were just being
imported from Africa and hadn’t yet landed on U.S. soil? I don’t think so!) and the wind and rain from the storm — were
supposed to be on the soundtrack. A later restored scene, in which the young,
impecunious Lincoln has his horse repossessed from him by a debt collector, was
also shown silent with subtitles because the soundtrack was lost. Personally, I
wish they’d reconstructed the soundtrack by having modern actors dub the lines
and using recordings of the period for the music (there must be a record of “Go
Down, Moses” of the proper vintage they could have used); finding a modern-day
actor to match Walter Huston’s idiosyncratic intonations as Lincoln might have
been a problem, but there are enough of Huston’s family members still alive and
working in the film business they could have found someone who could have pulled it off. But without the
willingness to budget a dubbing session or two, this is probably the best
solution they could have come up with. The opening titles hint at a
considerably more sophisticated sound mix than was common for 1930, and there
are enough scenes that do survive
with the original sound that it’s clear Griffith was pushing the boundaries of what was considered the
“proper” use of sound in a film. There are scenes in which music is heard
underscoring dialogue (an effect which didn’t become common until 1932), and
others in which off-screen choruses sing songs of the period to add richness
and context to the visuals and dialogue going on in front of them.
Lincoln has its problems, including the expected historical
mythologizing — the film was made at the height of the “Ann Rutledge legend,”
the myth that Lincoln had dated her in his early years in Illinois and had
never got over the shock of her early death, and that she had been the great
love of his life even though he eventually picked up his career and later
married someone else. (This seems to have got started among people who actually
knew Lincoln and who though him and Mary Todd so obviously ill-matched they
figured there must have been an
earlier partner in his history with whom he would have been more compatible.)
The film also has such annoying mistakes as opening with a slave ship plying
the Atlantic in 1809 (the slave trade had actually ended one year before) and
Lincoln’s famous line, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,”
inexplicably altered to, “A house divided against itself must fall” — and it
ends with Lincoln delivering a speech, a mash-up of the Second Inaugural and
the Gettysburg Address, as he takes his seat in the presidential box at Ford’s
Theatre before the start of the play during which he will be assassinated. It
also has the sort of “good construction” scene beloved of screenwriters of the
period, in which we meet John Wilkes Booth — played with the right combination
of theatricality and smarminess by Ian Keith (who in 1930 was also one of the actors
considered for the title role in Dracula when Universal needed a replacement for Lon Chaney, Sr., who had just
died — ultimately, of course, they went with Bela Lugosi, who had played the
part on the Broadway stage) — in 1860, cursing Lincoln’s election and saying
that the man who killed him would be doing the country a favor. (Apropos of The Conspirator, this film contains a scene which definitely
establishes that Booth was part of a conspiracy; we don’t learn who the other
people are but we hear one of them say, “Mrs. Surratt is definitely in.”)
Abraham
Lincoln is a great movie, albeit an uneven
one, if you can meet it halfway and accept it for what it is: a pageant-like
re-creation of historical events audiences in 1930 knew well and therefore
could fill in the gaps — like Lincoln suddenly exclaiming to Mary, I’ve found
the man to win this war! His name is … Grant!,” when the existence of a general
in the Union Army named Ulysses S. Grant has not been mentioned, or even hinted
at, in the film thus far. The film is pageant-like in its acting style as well;
Walter Huston delivers his lines with a sort of forced solemnity — at least
once past the early scenes in which Lincoln beats a tavern bully at wrestling
and otherwise shows us he’s jes’ plain folks — but then Abraham Lincoln is
probably the second most difficult part (next to Jesus Christ) for any actor to play and bring a semblance of real,
relatable humanity to, and for the same reason: the aura of holiness and
sanctity that has accreted onto Lincoln’s image over the decades and changed
him from the most polarizing President America has ever had (let’s face it,
when 11 states respond to your election by seceding and starting a civil war
instead of letting themselves be governed by you, that’s about as polarizing a
President as you can imagine!) to the closest thing the U.S. has to an official
saint. Any actor who plays
Lincoln, from Huston to Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey and on up through Daniel
Day-Lewis, is going to have the problem of balancing the human and the saintly
sides of Lincoln’s character — and quite frankly, within the limits of early
sound filmmaking and the pageant-like approach Griffith and the writers were
taking to the drama, Huston did it better than most. (This movie was also an interesting
warmup for his role three years later as a fictional U.S. President in an even weirder film, Gabriel
Over the White House.) Griffith’s one
casting miscalculation is Una Merkel, usually a comic-relief player, as Ann
Rutledge; her intonations bear a striking resemblance to Gracie Allen’s and her
performance hovers over the thin edge of risibility even though you have to
give her points for trying to
play the character seriously; she’s annoying enough that, unlike Lincoln, we’re
really not that sorry to see her go when she exits permanently one-third of the
way through the film.
Few of the other characters have enough screen time to
make much of an impression either way — Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is the
only member of Lincoln’s actual Cabinet to be shown on screen (and he’s played
by a white-haired veteran character actor named Oscar Apfel; the actors who
played Stanton in The Conspirator
and Lincoln both came closer to
the photos of the real Stanton) — though actor E. Alyn Warren manages an interesting
feat of playing both Stephen A.
Douglas and Ulysses S. Grant (as Grant he’s credited as “Fred Warren”), and
there’s a heart-rending silent close-up of Hobart Bosworth as Robert E. Lee
when he realizes that the war is lost and he has no realistic option but to
surrender. (Griffith, like Lee, was a Virginian and no doubt the pain of his
side having lost the war affected him personally even decades later.) Abraham Lincoln is an unjustly neglected film, proof that even past
his prime, limited by his own old-fashioned sensibilities and the difficulties
of adjusting to sound filmmaking, Griffith was a first-rate director — and one
thing that surprised Charles about the film was, especially in its restored
form, that it was in no way sympathetic to slavery. But then there are enough
examples of Griffith being surprisingly anti-racist — against anti-Indian
prejudice in Ramona, against
anti-Asian prejudice in Broken Blossoms, against religious prejudice and self-righteous “moralism” in Intolerance — one could make the case that The Birth
of a Nation is actually an outlier in his
overall career, a film shaped more by the lies Griffith got fed about
Reconstruction as a boy growing up in Virginia than by any deep-seated racist
prejudices on his part. (Then again, The Birth of a Nation is a
preposterously racist movie — something I hadn’t realized for years because the
first time I saw it was in a heavily cut version from the 1930’s which edited
it so it looked no more racist than Gone with the Wind — which made it all the more shocking when Charles
and I watched the full version later!) — 3/31/13
