A Sandburg Stumper

[Rob Wick]

Tom,

Be glad to.

In his review, written on December 29, 1924, Sandburg wrote the following:

"Lincoln the man not Lincoln the myth," was the central idea that animated Al and Ray Rockett when they set out on their three-year job of filming the life of Abraham Lincoln. These brothers had read or knew the contents of almost all of the 5,000 odd books that have been written about Lincoln and were dissected with the attempts of 90 percent of these to make Lincoln into a god-like wraith, something far-off and mystical. They felt that history had been trying to make Lincoln's memory into a statue, towering into the clouds and remote from all human activity.

To make their film Abraham Lincoln show the real and human man as he was they spent three years, infinite pains and all their money. How well their picture does this may be guessed by the furor it has caused in New York where it has been shown and may be determined accurately at the Roosevelt Theater.

Abraham Lincoln, the picture, trails with remarkable fidelity Lincoln from birth to death with special emphasis upon his loves, his romance and his married life, all phases which biographers have dealt lightly with. Al and Ray Rockett show in detail and with fine poetic feeling Lincoln's rustic love affair with Anne Rutledge, his grief at her death, his courtship of the high-spirited Mary Todd, his married life with her, a life so often sensationalized in the gossip of a nation and so minimized in written biographies.

The great incidents in Lincoln's life, his use of humor to steady the nerves of a war-crazed country, his boyhood struggles, his griefs in the presidency, his family life with his two little boys, his quick turn to them for relief from the harassments of political life, his quaint, gentle and profound mental life are all shown with one aim, to tell the truth about this greatest of Americans so that America today will appreciate him as a human being like themselves rather than as the nebulous myth."

(Source: The Movies Are: Carl Sandburg's Film Reviews and Essays pgs. 237-8) I should also note that there were a number of essays that Sandburg wrote using the film as a jumping off point.

Best
Rob