A continuing series. Young Mr. Lincoln, (1939), the title role ably played by a young Henry Fonda, ironically a life long Democrat, was directed with his usual brilliance by John Ford. The scene above where Lincoln, using humor and an appeal to “the better angels of their nature”, convinces a lynch mob to go home is pure Americana and pure fiction. The film is a heavily fictionalized, even by Hollywood standards, account of the famous 1857 Lincoln almanac murder trial. Of course at the real trial Lincoln was already famous and nearing the end of his successful legal career, while in the film he is completely unknown and a novice attorney. Fonda is convincing as Lincoln, despite the lack of any physical resemblance, by his use of dry humor throughout the film, very much in the Lincoln mode. The film gives a sense of a haunted Lincoln sensing somehow the destiny awaiting him. It also captures perfectly frontier Illinois. In Lincoln’s time there was no MidWest, but merely the West where Lincoln spent his life until his Presidency. Lincoln was always a Westerner, something he was quite conscious of. What we call the West was usually known as The Far West. The film captures well the time and place where Lincoln grew into a man able to save the Union.
Bonus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QogD4d54qTE&t=14s
