Young Mr. Lincoln

[RJNorton]

I thought I'd look for the New York Times' movie review of Young Mr. Lincoln, and I was able to find it:


Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
NYT Critics' Pick

THE SCREEN; Twentieth Century-Fox's Young Mr. Lincoln Is a Human and Humorous Film of the Prairie Years

By FRANK S. NUGENT

Published: June 3, 1939

One of the most human and humorous of the Lincoln biographies is "Young Mr. Lincoln," which Twentieth Century-Fox presented at the Roxy yesterday. Without a trace of self-consciousness or an interlinear hint that its subject is a man of destiny, it has followed young Abe through his early years in Illinois, chuckling over his gangliness and folksy humor, sympathizing with him in his melancholy, grinning from ear to ear with—and at—him as he goes to court in Springfield before a pipe-smoking judge and a jury of prairie-raised pundits. These were the happy years, before he got into politics; the picture is happier for ending before the long shadows came creeping up.

Henry Fonda's characterization is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon things: a crossroads meeting of nature, art and a smart casting director. Nature gave Mr. Fonda long legs and arms, a strong and honest face and a slow smile; the make-up man added a new nose bridge, the lank brown hair, the frock coat and stove-pipe hat (the beard hadn't begun to sprout in those days) and the trace of a mole. Mr. Fonda supplied the rest—the warmth and kindliness, the pleasant modesty, the courage, resolution, tenderness, shrewdness and wit that Lincoln, even young Mr. Lincoln, must have possessed. His performance kindles the film, makes it a moving unity, at once gentle and quizzically comic.

And yet, while his Lincoln dominates the picture, Director John Ford and Scriptwriter Lamar Trotti never have permitted it to stand out too obviously against its background—the Midwestern frontier. Scene and minor character have their place, and an important one. The prairie types have been skillfully drawn. One knows, somehow, that they are Lincoln's kind of people, that they think as he does, laugh at the same jokes, appreciate the same kind of horseplay. Had they been less carefully presented, Abe himself would have seemed less natural, would have been a stranger in his own community. Alice Brady's frontier mother, Donald Meek's spellbinding prosecutor, Spencer Charters's circuit judge, Eddie Collins's Efe—they all fit into the picture, give Mr. Fonda's colorful Lincoln the protection of their coloration.

The result of it, happily, is not merely a natural and straightforward biography, but a film which indisputably has the right to be called Americana. It isn't merely part of a life that has been retold, but, part of a way of living when government had advanced little beyond the town meeting stage, when every man knew his neighbor's business and meddled in it at times, when a municipal high spot was a pie-judging contest, the parade of the Silver Cornets and a tug of war on the principal thoroughfare. Against that background and through events more melodramatic and humorous than nationally eventful, Twentieth Century's "Young Mr. Lincoln" passes; and it a journey most pleasant to share.