by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The James Dean boxed set
entry Charles and I did watch
last night was John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln, broadcast live on May 26, 1952 and based on a
play John Drinkwater, a British actor, had written for himself in the 1920’s.
Instead of attempting to do a bio-play of Lincoln’s entire life, Drinkwater
just cherry-picked a few of the most famous anecdotes from the Lincoln
biographies and put them on the stage. I knew about this play because Dorothy
Parker had reviewed its original production, and I presume the play ran
considerably longer than the 52 minutes allotted to it on TV. (The version on
the James Dean boxed set was missing the original commercials; my guess is it
was prepared for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, which produced
commercial-free copies of U.S. radio and TV shows for the entertainment of U.S.
servicemembers stationed abroad.) The show was adapted by David Shaw, who no
doubt had to further cherry-pick Drinkwater’s play to get it down to TV length
but otherwise did a reasonably good job — even Drinkwater’s original, if
Parker’s review is to be believed, wouldn’t have made that much sense if you
didn’t already know the story — and, astonishingly for a Lincoln story, the
top-billed actor was a woman, Judith Evelyn (one of those charmingly
“reversible” names), who was cast as Mary Todd, Lincoln’s ambitious wife.
What
makes this show a bit unusual for Lincolniana on film is that it’s one of the
most sympathetic portrayals of her I’ve seen; much of the consensus in Lincoln
literature portrays her as an ambitious ball-buster on the edge of dementia
(and since she did go crazy after Lincoln’s
death — their son Robert had to sign her into a mental institution — that’s at
least a defensible position), and apparently both the negative portrayal of
Mary in a lot of the Lincoln literature and the raising of the short-lived and
mysterious Ann Rutledge to the status of the real love of Lincoln’s life came from the fact that the
first biography of Lincoln was written in the 1880’s by his former law partner,
William Herndon, who never could stand Mary and let the world know it. This Mary is certainly ambitious both for herself and
her husband — she’s shown pushing him to run for President over his initial
reluctance — and we know that’s true because there’s a famous anecdote (not
included here, though it could have been) of the night Lincoln received the
official committee of the Republican convention that was sent to notify him
formally that he’d won the nomination. “There is a woman upstairs who will be
far more interested in this information than I am,” Lincoln told them. Lincoln
is played by Robert Pastene, who’s a bit short for the role (though at least
the TV producers didn’t put him in six-inch elevator shoes the way D. W.
Griffith did to Walter Huston for his 1930 Lincoln biopic) and whose attempt to
do the reportedly high-lying Lincoln voice makes him sound like he’s gargling,
but he’s otherwise quite impressive in the role and manages to convey the
mixture of steely resolve and sometimes crippling depression the historical
record of the real Lincoln tells us he had. The film cuts from the scene in
1860 when two politicians are trying to talk Lincoln into running for President
(and one of them makes the mistake of smoking in Lincoln’s parlor — apparently
Mary Todd Lincoln was an anti-smoking activist about a century before that
became “in”) to one early on in his presidency in which Fort Sumter is being
besieged and a delegate named Jennings (Noel Leslie) is sent to meet with
Secretary of State William Seward (Charles Eggleston) to see if the southern
states can broker a deal with Lincoln to be allowed to keep slavery in return
for not seceding.
The show depicts Lincoln (who in the script has a hissy-fit
that Jennings went to see Seward instead of coming to Lincoln himself) as dead
set against making any deal
with the states attempting to secede that would involve guaranteeing their
“right” to allow slavery — a position diametrically opposed to that of the real
Lincoln, who in 1861 before he formally took office sent his favorite
back-channel negotiator, Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland (one of the
so-called “border states” which had slavery but didn’t secede), to offer the
future Confederate states a so-called “unamendable amendment” to the
Constitution which would forever guarantee slavery in the states that already
had it in exchange for their pledge to stay in the Union and not expand slavery
anywhere else. Then there’s a montage of Civil War battle sequences, from Fort
Sumter to Manassas/Bull Run (the catastrophic Union defeat that let the North
in for the fact that it was going to be a considerably longer war than anyone there had thought), a few
other campaigns, leading up to Shiloh and then Antietam, the September 17, 1862
Union victory that gave Lincoln (the real one) the win on the battlefield he
needed to give the Emancipation Proclamation both military and political
credibility. The script actually has Lincoln saying to his Cabinet the famous
lines he wrote to editor Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862 — “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the
Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
some and leaving others alone I would also do that” — which progressive
historians like the late Howard Zinn have quoted to argue that Lincoln really
didn’t give a damn about slavery one way or the other. I read that letter as a
classic piece of “disinformation” on Lincoln’s part; at the time he wrote it he
already had a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his desk drawer at the
White House and was only waiting for enough of a Union victory to give him the
excuse to issue it. Indeed, I looked up the letter online at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm
and noted that in its final paragraph, Lincoln wrote, “I have here stated my
purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
Lincoln’s hand
on emancipation had also been forced by the first (1856) Republican Presidential nominee, John C. Frémont,
who as military governor of Missouri (a slaveholding state that hadn’t seceded,
though Lincoln was convinced enough that it would he appointed Frémont to
govern it and make sure it didn’t) had
issued his own emancipation proclamation. Contrary to actual historical fact,
David Shaw’s script for this show makes it seem as if the Emancipation
Proclamation freed all U.S. slaves,
which it didn’t; it applied only to the states in rebellion against the Union
authority and not in the slaveholding
border states Lincoln was anxious to keep in the Union because losing them
would have been devastating to the North’s military position. It’s not terribly
surprising that here, as in the opening scene set in 1860, that Lincoln is being
depicted as a far more uncompromising opponent of slavery than he was — and the
next big scene is a confrontation between Lincoln and an unnamed member of his
Cabinet he’s determined to fire. Shaw’s script doesn’t detail who this person
was or why Lincoln wanted to get rid of him, but my guess is that it’s Simon
Cameron, Lincoln’s first Secretary of War and the rival Republican Presidential
candidate in 1860 with whom Lincoln cut a deal and promised him Secretary of
War in exchange for Cameron’s delegates to the Republican convention.
Unfortunately, once he was Secretary of War Cameron proved both incompetent and
corrupt, and the Union army got few of the supplies the North’s taxpayers were
paying for, so Lincoln forced him out and replaced him with Edwin Stanton, who
did such a great job of keeping the Union armed forces supplied and fighting
there were a lot of people back then who thought he had been the key person in winning the Civil War (one
reason why so many Republican Congressmembers were up in arms when Lincoln’s
successor, Andrew Johnson, tried to fire Stanton in 1868)
The 52-minute show
is nearly over before we finally get to see James Dean (ya remember James
Dean?), who’s cast as William Scott, a
Union soldier who’s just been court-martialed and is scheduled to be shot for
having fallen asleep while on guard duty at the Union’s garrison at Appomattox.
The scene is prefaced with a lot of excited talk amongst the Union’s generals,
including Ulysses S. Grant (unidentified on imdb.com, oddly), that the war is
about over anyway, and Lincoln visits the camp and wonders why there needs to
be more killing, especially with the war just about over. Needless to say, he
spares Scott’s life and sends him back to his regiment — though it reminded of
my grim joke that if you believe the movies about him, Lincoln did nothing for
the last few days of his life except sign pardons (the film The Littlest
Rebel, the Shirley Temple vehicle in which
she plays a Confederate girl and does the famous staircase dance with her
family’s slave, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, went so far as to have Lincoln sign
the pardon for James Dunn, playing Temple’s father, as he was reaching for his
hat and coat to go to Ford’s Theatre on the fateful night of April 14, 1865!) —
only to find, irony of ironies, that Scott was killed in battle the next day
just before the war ended. The final scene shows Lincoln and his wife Mary
ready to leave for Ford’s Theatre, only before they go Lincoln asks her to read
him the famous “we are such stuff as dreams are made of” speech from (what was
then thought) Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, a considerably better play than the one they were going
to see. (When Ford’s Theatre was restored, the first piece put on there was the
actual play Lincoln was there to see, a British farce called Our American
Cousin, and it was so terrible the
reviewers to a person essentially wrote, “Lincoln got himself shot so he could
see this?”)
According to an imdb.com commentator, Drinkwater’s original play depicted the
actual assassination, but this show didn’t; instead it ended with a close-up of
the edition of The Tempest Mary was
reading from, though instead of pronouncing the trademark line correctly the
second time around Judith Evelyn said, “We are such dreams as dreams are made
of” — one of the occupational hazards of live TV: if you made a mistake
millions of people heard it and there was no way to take it back or do a
retake! Overall, John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln was a quite capable piece of work, decently cast with the
sorts of actors available to New York TV producers, even though it suffers from
the same flaw as virtually all films about Lincoln: too reverent towards him,
uninclined to make him a figure of real dramatic complexity. I’ve already said apropos of the recent film Lincoln and the others Charles and I watched around the same time
— oldies like the Griffith Abraham Lincoln and John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island (about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who at least according to the film
was accused and convicted by a military tribunal of being part of the
conspiracy to kill Lincoln because in his flight from the crime, John Wilkes
Booth came by Dr. Mudd’s home and Mudd set the leg Booth had broken in his
dramatic leap from Lincoln’s box after he shot him) and Young Mr. Lincoln — that Lincoln is probably the second hardest part in the
world for an actor to play (next to Jesus Christ) and for many of the same
reasons: Lincoln has been so deified in American mainstream historiography it’s
virtually impossible for a writer to bring him to multidimensional life or an
actor to play him that way. And as for James Dean, he’s perfectly competent —
interestingly, he mumbles less than he did later — but nothing special; oddly,
as silly as the whole production is, probably the best performance he’s given so far in our trek through the boxed set is in
one of the silliest movies, as the Apostle John in that strange 1951 religious
film Hill Number One that Charles
described the first time we saw it as “an infomercial for rosary beads.” (It
was, too.)
