Movie Review: Young Mr. Lincoln

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda, Alice Brady

(Note: This is my entry in the John Ford Blogathon, hosted by Krell Laboratories.)

Young Mr. Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) is a man of weighty thoughts but light experience, at least when it comes to the rule of law. All he really knows, he's only learned from books. But after he loses his first love Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore), Lincoln makes up his mind to study the law in earnest. However, his first case will prove to be as great a challenge as he could ever have imagined.

The Clay family have come to town for a Fourth of July celebration. At the fair, the two brothers (Richard Cromwell and Eddie Quillan) get into a fight and a man ends up dead with a knife in him. Both Clays are accused of murder. Both are determined to take the blame, trying to spare their brother from a hanging. Their mother (Alice Brady) is a witness to the crime but absolutely refuses to say a word; she'll never sacrifice one to save the other. The other key witness to the crime is J. Palmer Cass (Ward Bond), a friend of the victim; he insists that he saw the stabbing by the light of the moon and refuses to budge on that point.

Lincoln agrees to take on the case, but all the fates seem against him. He's got a town braying for the blood of the two Clay boys, a town that's ready to lynch them at any second. He's got a jury that's already biased against the case. He's got no testimony to counter the accusations. His defendants won't tell the truth of what happened. And he himself is as green a lawyer as ever walked into a courtroom. But that won't stop him from putting up one hell of a fight. Little does he know that it's only the beginning for him.

Of all our presidents, Abraham Lincoln is arguably the most cinematic. Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson had more bombastic personalities and George Washington was the more standardized hero, but Lincoln stands out as uniquely well suited to the big screen. He's both the approachable, folksy "rail-splitter," the common man striving to better himself, and the mythical, untouchable paladin for human rights. He's a figure we can look up to in awe, but, to snag an old election phrase, someone we could also imagine wanting to share a drink with. Consider that in the very same year, we got both a big-budget, prestigious, Oscar-nominated film inspired by Lincoln's efforts to pass the Thirteenth Amendment and a splashy fantasy action flick about Abraham Lincoln, the vampire slayer. Lincoln presents, in many ways, the archetypal image of what Americans want to think about themselves. Sharp and tricksy but also reasoned and wise. Compassionate yet stern as steel. A humble background but the will for power.

John Ford's 1939 biographic film, Young Mr. Lincoln, is a testament to those ideas of Abraham Lincoln and in that regard, it's a beautiful, modest, rather slippery piece of work. "Biographic" is a term I use very loosely here, because the movie has little interest in retelling the facts of Lincoln's life. It marks off a lot of the famous little anecdotes about his early career, like the time when he told the story of the dog and the pitchfork in court or the time he asked Mary Todd to dance ("I want to dance with you in the worst way"). But it carries precious little in the way of facts. The movie invents wholesale a story about him defending a pair of accused murderers and devotes most of the runtime to that. With the overwhelming abundance of storytelling material in Lincoln's actual life, the choice to depict him as a crusading Atticus Finch seems oddly limiting at first glance.

However, once you get past that mental hurdle, Young Mr. Lincoln offers a portrait of Lincoln that is deeply affecting and more complicated than you might expect from the synopsis. In fact, the Lincoln here has a lot in common with the 2012 Spielberg version of Lincoln. They're both presented as canny, thoughtful men, not above using a little trickery or insults to get their way. The Lincoln in this film cracks lowbrow jokes, hems and haws over his true intention and calmly manipulates people. He even cheats to win a game of tug-of-war at one point and John Ford cuts away without tipping his hand as to whether we're supposed to applaud his smarts or be disconcerted by his casual disregard for rules. Without showing Lincoln's political career, the 1939 film manages to throw in a great many hints about his political aptitude. This film also highlights Lincoln's essential isolation from other people, ending in a famous scene of him walking alone up a hill that surely must have been in Spielberg's mind when he filmed the final scene for his version. The key difference between the 1939 and 2012 biopics is that the Spielberg story is about the collaboration and compromises Lincoln and other people must make to form that more perfect Union. Ford's film, by contrast, presents Lincoln as a singular figure, one whose struggles are not truly shared or understood by anyone else. 

Sometimes, an actor's star persona is virtually indistinguishable from his offscreen one, as in the case of Clifton Webb. Other times, it's almost a night and day contrast; the down-to-earth homemaker turns into a sultry temptress on silver nitrate or vice versa. Personally, I hold to the theory that you can usually unearth bits and flashes of the actor's true self underneath the performance, no matter how wide the gulf seems at first. Vincent Price's joy in living, Joan Crawford's drive for self-improvement, Rita Hayworth's need to please. It's there if you know where to look for it. But Henry Fonda is one actor that strains that theory of mine to the breaking point.

On film, Henry Fonda is the purest personification of honesty. He isn't just a good guy. He's the hero struggling in the dark, his eyes fixed on some distant mountain peak of perfection that the rest of us can only imagine. He could take characters as decent and honorable as Tom Joad, Juror No. 8, Wyatt Earp, and Abraham Lincoln and convince you that they were possible. And yet in real life, Henry Fonda was a cold, unreachable man who alienated his loved ones and quite frankly, acted like a shit to them much of the time. After you've read a few of the Fonda family bios, it seems frankly unbelievable that this man could dig deep enough to find the fathomless generosity and compassion of his most famous roles.

However, when you look at Henry Fonda and compare him to the other famous "good guy" actor, James Stewart, the connection snaps into place. The hallmark of a Fonda hero, as opposed to a Stewart hero, isn't heartfelt emotion, it's thought. Fonda heroes are always staring off somewhere into the middle distance, thinking their way towards a solution. Unlike Stewart, who so often ends up loving too well and not too wisely, Fonda is more isolated, more cerebral and less open. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart's climactic speech has him distraught and anguished, voice cracking, fiery and exhausted. In Grapes of Wrath, Fonda's famous speech has him looking offscreen, patient and undaunted, slowly struggling his way towards the understanding that he himself belongs to a larger whole. And there is a certain coldness to that kind of hero. He can't belong to us in the way Stewart can. 

All this is leading up to a notion of mine that when Henry Fonda plays the John Ford hero, it results in films that tend to be quieter and less easy to pin down than Ford's films with John Wayne. My Darling Clementine, The Grapes of Wrath, and Young Mr. Lincoln all have their fair share of Fordian humor and American nostalgia, but they keep us at more of a distance (I have a feeling that Mr. Roberts might be the exception that proves the rule but don't tell me, I still haven't seen it).

I realize that I have spent almost this entire review talking about Henry Fonda and not the supporting cast, which includes some famous names, including Ward Bond, Donald Meek, Alice Brady, and Richard Cromwell. And that's for the very good reason that this film is really Fonda's showcase the whole way through. When he's not onscreen, you're waiting for him to come back. The other characters don't really register, although I appreciate the sly touch of having the aptly-named Donald Meek play Lincoln's slick, confident opponent. Alice Brady's performance as the anguished mother of the defendants is also good, but the script rarely gives her more than one note to play. Truthfully, Young Mr. Lincoln, while a great character study for its protagonist, does suffer a little by making the supporting characters so simple. John Ford films in general rely heavily on archetypal characters, but I can't help feeling that they came across as richer and deeper in movies like How Green Was My Valley or Stagecoach than they do here.

The greatest joy this film has to offer for John Ford fans, aside from Fonda, is the aching beauty of its camerawork. His shots of Lincoln rambling through the woods look like something you want to hang in a gallery, they're so well framed. Ford's ability to find both emotion and mythic resonance in his stories is also just as evident here as it is in his more famous films. There's an early scene with Lincoln talking to his first love Ann Rutledge out near the river. She encourages his dreams, he compliments her hair. The sun is shining. The mood is tentative and hopeful; their romance is just barely beginning. When she walks away, Lincoln tosses a stone in the river. The ripples slowly transition to shifting blocks of ice in the dead of winter. The camera finds Lincoln making a slow, deliberate walk to Ann's grave to replace the flowers there. The cruel, lovely simplicity of the image cuts straight to the bone.

For me, the best John Ford films are built on moments like that. Moments that make us feel like we're seeing an elemental truth of human experience. While I wouldn't rank Young Mr. Lincoln as one of his greatest films, if only because his best is so very great, it carries enough of those moments to make me very glad that John Ford and Henry Fonda chose to make their idea of Abraham Lincoln. In 1939, they were without a doubt the best men for the job.

Favorite Quote:

"What I'm afraid of is that some of the jurors might not know you...and that'd put me at a great disadvantage."

Favorite Scene: 

The scene in which Lincoln takes on an angry lynch mob. It's a simple scene on the surface, but it's so elegantly constructed that if I taught film classes, I'd make it required viewing for all my students. Abraham Lincoln has just taken on the case of the two Clay brothers and a raging mob descends on the cell, ready to storm it and kill the boys then and there. Lincoln appears just in time and throws himself between the crowd and the door, armed with nothing but his lanky body and the sound of his voice. Rather than just appealing to their better natures or diffusing the situation with humor or angrily calling them out, Lincoln applies all these strategies in one speech, revealing his incredible political aptitude for the first time. 

I love the way that Ford matches the shifting camera angles to Lincoln's shifting tactics. In the first part of the scene, when Lincoln appears in front of the door, Ford's camera goes for a jarring, extreme close-up of his back turning around. When he turns, the camera has traveled sharply away from him and he's a distant, almost frightening figure in black, loudly proclaiming that he'll beat up anyone who tries to pass him. As the crowd argue with him, Lincoln gradually turns the conversation into subtle mockery, poking fun at himself in order to draw a laugh from them ("I'm just a fresh lawyer trying to get ahead...and you boys act like you want to do me out of my first clients"). Ford brings the camera closer and now Lincoln is in the middle of the frame. He's more approachable now, but rather cool and dispassionate. The crowds starts to calm. Ford cuts to a beautiful closeup of Lincoln, now leaning against the doorframe, his head bowed. He begins speaking regretfully of the nature of lynch mobs, subtly drawing the conversation away from the comical waste of money to the real moral cost. The humor's gone. Then he actually calls out one of the mob by name, reminding him of his honorable name and piety. He paints a picture for the crowd of this same man going home to read his bible and turning to the passage, "Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy." By now, the crowd has been thoroughly subdued. Their battering ram is almost slipping from their hands. Lincoln looks up and says softly, "Why don't you put it down for a spell, boys, ain't it getting heavy." He has won a total victory. Moreover, Ford's camerawork matches Fonda's performance so perfectly in this scene, Lincoln can't help but win over the movie audience as well.

Final Six Words:

Wise, wistful portrait of elusive legend

Movie Review: Dodge City

Dodge City (1939)
directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland

Wade Hatton (Errol Flynn) is a soldier of fortune, a man who goes wherever the winds of chance and danger take him. Along with his faithful friend Rusty (Alan Hale), he accepts the job of helping the railroad come to the newly christened Dodge City. Its patron Colonel Dodge (Henry O'Neill) swears to the settlers that Dodge City will be a place of prosperity and civilization. But fast forward several years and it turns out that all those plans have gone awry. The ruthless Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot) has taken control of the town; he and his gang cheat, steal, and murder with total impunity. The law is helpless.

If only they had a sheriff that wasn't afraid of Surrett, a man like Wade Hatton. But Wade isn't interested in a badge or in putting down roots. He just wants to finish up guiding a wagon train of settlers to Dodge City and he'll be on his way. An easy job that turns tragic when he ends up killing a drunken settler in self defense, a settler that happens to be the brother of beautiful Abbie Irving (Olivia de Havilland). But Abbie and Wade will have to join forces anyway when Surrett's evil becomes too much for the town to handle. He and his gang need to get the hell out of Dodge...

When I think of classic Westerns, I think about John Wayne standing in the doorway and looking at a life that will never be his and Gary Cooper staring down an empty and endless road. I think about Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, trying hopelessly to tell young toughs not to throw their lives away. James Stewart in The Naked Spur, dragging Robert Ryan's corpse behind him, crying out in anguish, "I'm going to sell him for money!" The little Mexican boys in The Magnificent Seven, putting flowers on the grave of the man who died for them. Regret is the shadow that dogs the steps of all great Western heroes and it's hard to think of a classic Western that doesn't end on a bittersweet note, mourning the slow death of the frontier even as it tries to reconcile the era's bloody hypocrisies.

1939 was the year that John Ford would redefine the Western for all time with Stagecoach.
It was also the year of the uneven but important Destry Rides Again, the movie that stitched the template for future Western parodies like Blazing Saddles. In both films, happiness came to the protagonists in the end but it came quietly, after heartbreak and pain. In Stagecoach, the heroes can only be happy after they're freed "from the blessings of civilization." In Destry's case, the story's darkness ended up choking off all the comedy, with the pacifist hero taking up arms and sloughing off all memory of the woman that took a bullet for him.

And then you have Dodge City, a box-office-smashing 1939 Western that, despite sharing the same genre trappings as Stagecoach and Destry, doesn't even feel like part of the same species. The plot is pure Western, with Flynn's character called in to clean up a lawless town, held hostage by ruthless gunmen. And yet there's none of that bittersweet quality you get from other Westerns. No melancholy commentary on the toll of violence. No longing to escape the bounds of civilization. Most importantly of all, no sense of loneliness. Instead we have a bright-eyed tale of good and evil, two factions facing off against each other in the name of returning things to the natural order. Oh and comic sidekicks do things and beautiful people fall in love. Dodge City is essentially another Errol Flynn swashbuckler, albeit one that just happens to be set in the American frontier.

The great charm and the great weakness of this film is that when it tries to be serious or heartfelt, it fails miserably. As in the scene where Random but Honorable Citizen has just been murdered by the villain Surrett and his heartbroken moppet of a son pulls the world's silliest crying face at the funeral:

On the flip side, when the movie gives up on drama and just embraces a spirit of fun, it can be quite enjoyable. I liked the comic interlude of Alan Hale (an underrated character actor who always seemed like pleasant company, no matter how dimwitted the role) falling into the clutches of the town's temperance league and vowing repentance. I liked the rowdy bar fight in the middle of the film that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. I liked watching Flynn stride around in neatly pressed, colorful Western wear, blithely explaining away the accent by calling himself a wandering Irishman.

I was reminded of Errol Flynn when I saw the unfairly-maligned John Carter last year. Watching Taylor Kitsch struggle to hit all the required character notes of dashing rogue, battle-scarred veteran, romantic lead, and compassionate hero made me think of just how effortless Flynn could make it all seem. I feel like I could stop a Flynn performance frame by frame and point out all the mechanics of it ("here comes the hearty laugh, now the noble frown") and yet somehow the magic remains. Watching him onscreen is an invitation to adventure. The greatest tribute to Flynn I can give is that over fifty years after his death, we're still looking for him. Kitsch by comparison just looks and sounds like any other earnest young actor, buffed up for his big break.

While Flynn took (and continues to take) plenty of knocks for being cinema's most courtly cowboy, Olivia de Havilland is hardly any more natural as a frontierswoman. In Dodge City, she's got the cutest little rolled-up sleeves you can imagine and the manners of a princess who's just had her luggage stolen. When Flynn tells her that out here men sometimes have to take the law into their own hands, de Havilland wrinkles her nose and responds with, "Oh yes, pioneering, I believe you call it." By all accounts, Dodge City was a rotten experience for de Havilland, who was completely fed up with being the decorative frosting in every Flynn movie. According to TCM, she would have preferred to play the sexy saloon girl, a part that went to Ann Sheridan. Looking at the film though, it's hard to see why since Sheridan gets absolutely nothing to do.

That is, except to model the latest in Black Trash Bag and Fake Flower Couture:

And to lead the chorus of the Dancing Cupcake Liners:

I suspect something was left on the cutting room floor. That or de Havilland was just grasping for anything even slightly different from what Warners usually gave her. Actually, as Goatdog points out in his excellent run-down of Olivia de Havilland's action career, Dodge City gave the actress more to do than some of her other Flynn roles. Instead of being relegated to the parlor, she gets to work in a newspaper office, scowling at Flynn when he jokingly tells her to go find a man's buttons to sew back on. 

What really saps her character of interest is the lack of a true emotional arc. There was potential for it, though. Wade Hatton is the man that killed Abbie's brother, which makes for a darker and more unsettling obstacle to the Flynn-de Havilland romance than most of their films. However, the impact is dulled because a) her brother is a complete tool, a man so obviously gunning for the pre-modern equivalent of a Darwin Award that his death is more comic than tragic and b) the death is treated as something Abbie's just got to get over, silly female emotions be damned. Come to think of it, isn't that how most Flynn films treat the romance, with Flynn alternately mocking de Havilland and waiting for her to realize that he was right all along? However, Dodge City's romance lacks the kinky energy of Captain Blood ("I look at you as the woman who owns me") or the sweetness of The Adventures of Robin Hood so it falls flat. 

Still, we're left with the ever-powerful chemistry between the two performers and their incredible physical beauty, made even more mesmerizing by Technicolor. Watching them banter under sunny skies is just one of those classic cinematic pleasures that can't be taken away by bad writing and the knowledge that de Havilland was counting the hours until she could get off this set.

Michael Curtiz's direction keeps the film moving along briskly even if it's essentially a game of stalling until Wade Hatton finally decides to take down Surrett for good. Curtiz was an old hand at the swashbuckling genre by now and even in scenes where it's just people talking, the camerawork is alert but unobtrusive. His characters are in constant motion, but he knows how to keep an audience focused even as he dollies back through enormous crowds of extras. I'm sort of in love with the way Curtiz films always make the dialogue sound interesting. In the case of Dodge City, I never realized how pedestrian the wisecracks were until I tried to rummage through them for a favorite quote. And of course, when the action does pick up, Curtiz ratchets up the excitement for a hair-raising and fiery climax on a moving train. 

One thing I notice about the old Flynn swashbucklers is that they almost always leave a sour aftertaste in regards to their theme of restoring the rights and privileges of white men. They Died with Their Boots On is the most obvious example of historical awkwardness, with General Custer burnished as a hero and the U.S. government absolved of any responsibility in the destruction of native lives and land. But there's also Santa Fe Trail, which practically ties itself into a Viennese pretzel trying to decry the fanatical actions of John Brown while hemming and hawing over just what he was so fanatical about. In that one, Flynn's character just kept repeating that slavery could not be destroyed so quickly. As opposed to Captain Blood in which he's leading a white slave rebellion. Dodge City smoothly elides the question of native rights by just ignoring them entirely, aside from a brief mention that Surrett is shooting buffalo that rightfully belong to the Native Americans. 

Ultimately, Dodge City remains a mildly enjoyable footnote in one of the greatest years for American cinema. The most interesting aspect of the film is how little relation it has to the Westerns that came after it. This is the Western reinvented for pure spectacle, a Technicolor adventure starring one of the most beloved screen teams of all time. It's an ice cream soda in a genre stocked with straight whiskey. Looking at Flynn and de Havilland, it's hard not to feel a pang that swashbucklers have died out. But it would be equally difficult not to sigh in relief that movie Westerns would follow a rockier and more complicated path in the decades to come.

Favorite Quote:

"You're not suggesting that I'm a native?"

"No. The only real native of Kansas is the buffalo. He's got a very hard head, a very uncertain temper, and a very lonely future. Apart from that there's hardly any point of comparison between you."

Favorite Scene:

In my recent review of Epstein's Lee Marvin biography, I mentioned the actor's open disdain for the smooth, harmless violence of typical movie brawls. "Tables and bottles go along with mirrors and bartenders, and you end up with that little trickle of blood down your cheek, and you're both pals and wasn't it a hell of a wonderful fight...that's phony." Marvin had a very good point, but I think the epic barroom brawl in Dodge City is so enjoyable that it deserves to be taken on its own terms. Michael Curtiz clearly decided to stage the fight in much the same way Busby Berkeley handles his musical set pieces. It's big, glorious, and defies you to make sense of it or its relation to the plot. Just about everything you could imagine in a Western saloon fight happens in this sequence. People are sent flying off of balconies. Chairs and tables are crashed over so many heads that the furniture is eventually whittled down to toothpicks. At one point, a cowboy tries to lasso his opponent into submission. What looks like hundreds of Warner Brothers extras are all there, swinging and hollering away. When the camera finally pans away, allowing the viewer to look at the full extent of the destruction, it's hard not to marvel.

Final Six Words: 

Effervescent adventure, more charm than heart