Yes. There's a wealth of material to do a really interesting disc of this film, especially the Cahiers stuff, and the man to myth transformation, spurred by personal experience and using the law to uphold the rights of the individual and democratic freedoms, rather than a possible (left leaning) broader quest for social justice fuelling political and societal change...
I'm attached to my VHS copies of 50 Ford films (+5 DVD) am strangely underwhelmed by this CC release...
This is interesting contemporaneous review from NYT in 1939... Frank S. Nugent of course wrote the script of THE SEARCHERS (plus FORT APACHE, 3 GODFATHERS, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, WAGONMASTER, THE QUIET MAN, THE RISING OF THE MOON, THE LAST HURRAH, TWO RODE TOGETHER & DONOVAN's REEF) for Ford!
YOUNG MR. LINCOLN June 3, 1939 By Frank S. Nugent
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 makeup 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 is a journey most pleasant to share.
YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (MOVIE)
Directed by John Ford; written by Lamar Trotti; cinematographers, Bert Glennon and Arthur Miller; edited by Walter Thompson; music by Alfred Newman; art designers, Richard Day and Mark-Lee Kirk; produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and Kenneth MacGowan; released by Twentieth Century Fox. Black and white. Running time: 100 minutes.
With: Henry Fonda (Abraham Lincoln), Alice Brady (Abagail Clay), Marjorie Weaver (Mary Todd), Arleen Whelan (Hannah Clay), Eddie Collins (Efe), Pauline Moore (Ann Rutledge), Richard Cromwell (Matt Clay), Donald Meek (John Felder), and Spencer Charters (Judge Herbert A. Bell).
