-Devdutt Trivedi
Young Mr. Lincoln(1939) is amongst Ford’s most influential films and has become along with select films in the same period made by Frank Capra (particularly Mr. Smith Goes to Washington completed in the same year), as the archetype for the cinematic streamlining of that much maligned monster: ‘The American Dream.’ The film was one amongst the five films Ford made between 1939 and 1941 that established him as a great American director, in spite of him being unable to make ‘serious’ films. The mini-phase began with Ford’s incomparable masterpiece Stagecoach and ended in 1941 with the Oscar nominated How Green Was My Valley.
John Ford, as analyzed in the recent essay by Richard Franklin is certainly amongst Hollywood’s most understudied directors as compared to his colleagues Hitchcock and particularly Orson Welles. According to Franklin, Welles viewed Ford’s masterpiece Stagecoach (1939), 40 times before venturing on making his debut Citizen Kane (1941).
Welles stated that he was influenced ‘by the old guys, the “classical” film makers’, which Franklin reads as being an ode to Ford. The cutting of disproportionate volumes to formalize the mise-en-scene and keep relocating the spectator in Ford’s best work, is reprised in Welles’ Kane made two years later
Ford’s film is based on a fictionalized account of the youth of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois and denotes a phase of transformation, having suffered the death of his girlfriend Ann and in the process of courting his wife to be, Mary Todd. The film has Henry Fonda playing the lead, who along with James Stewart defined Griffith’s vision of a linear American history about ‘a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilization.’ Deleuze’s analysis of Ford concludes that Ford through his visual approach indicates a single, uniform American history that is in the midst of transformation. Although in this 1939 classic, Mr. Lincoln is the hero, Tad Gallaghar views the Lincoln figure as archetype for Ford’s protagonists:
The hero, of whom Abraham Lincoln will be typical, has a priestly quality: both of and above the people, he is a mediator, a lonely soul, continent but tragic.
Ford’s cinema is a strange combination of Lumiere and Melies, attempting to capture the reality of a completely studio produced (or ‘false’) landscape. One would have to say that the propagandist approach, verging on ultra Right Wing racism, taken up by Ford is closer to Melies in its ability to ‘to convince the crowd… (by having to).. resort to tricks.’ Lincoln is a figure for Christ and the landscape becomes a milieu for his successful struggle against the masses. The idea of religiosity, suggested by the references to the Bible, are transformed to a landscape document in sequences which depict ‘the transition from the nomadic to the written law, from nomos to logos’ which is best brought out in the sequence where Lincoln enters Springfield on his ass symbolizing the Christ figure. These sequences and their depiction of the link between American interiority and exteriority in space, combined with Ford’s concern for the ‘undivided sky’ (which becomes linguistic concern in Hawks’ The Big Sky (1946)) would influence several
important directors, most importantly Akira Kurosawa in his westerns, Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuiro (1962)
The film follows in the direction taken up by Stagecoach (1939) of, as concluded in Nicke Browne’s remarkable study of the classic Ford Western, relocating the viewer with every successive cut in order to constantly relocate the spectator’s position with respect to the becoming of the text as well as creating an anticipation-recognition process in the minds of the spectator to form what David Bordwell calls a’ cinematographic system.’ If the film does reek of Right Wing conservatism, through its representation of religions and ignorance of the blacks and one suggestive reference to ‘slaves,’ Gallagher’s remarkable study of Ford reveals as to the possible reasons why Lincoln could not be shown protecting black youths from a lynch mob. Ford had tried to tackle problems of class in his previous work Judge Priest (1934) only to have the studios censor out the sequences. According to Gallagher if the studios would have kept the sequences, the theatres would have been forced to edit out the sequences themselves.
In the film, according to the Internet Movie Database, the trial of William "Duff" Armstrong, on which the fictionalized defense of Matt and Adam Clay shown in the film is based, actually took place in 1858, when Lincoln was a successful railroad attorney and soon to be a nominee for the Senate. The other person accused of murder had been convicted in a separate trial several months earlier.
When Henry Fonda was offered the role, he said he didn’t think he could ‘play God’ i.e. Lincoln and only changed his mind when Ford had him play out a sequence in full makeup. The Academy Award Theatre later broadcast a 30 minute feature with Fonda reprising his screen role. The produced Darryl F. Zanuck and Ford fought over control of the film, with Ford destroying the outtakes so that Fox couldn’t change the film. These outtakes included a scene where Lincoln meets his future assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
The film works within the logic of appropriation, i) of nature through its constructed use of objects from nature within the frame, most notably the branch of trees that would later adorn his colour Westerns, ii) appropriation of language to text through law, best denoted in the sequence where Lincoln-Fonda exclaims ‘BOOKS’ followed by a similar exited utterance ‘LAW’, and iii) the appropriation of grace as occurring within the Jesuit dichotomy between suffering and enlightenment which arises out of rationalized causality. The narrative- becoming and its underlining of suffering-enlightenment dichotomy through the figure of Christ-Lincoln are brought out through a causal approach to the events in the text. It is precisely this causality that allows for the nationalistic and ultra Right Wing image associated with Ford and Stewart.
Fonda on the other hand is a much more interesting character than Ford. Although the body of his work falls within the same logic as that of the chauvinistic Ford, including his Hithcock piece The Wrong Man (1939) which is also a meditation on religion, his work in 12 Angry Men which Fonda himself called the most important film of his career as he had also produced it, shows a Langian concern for the nihilism between a negative action i.e. a crime and its cause. 12 Angry Men was directed by Sidney Lumet who went on to
continue to show touches of his Leftist ideology in his ‘70s films such as Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976). His daughter Jane Fonda would collaborate with Jean-Luc Godard on his radical Leftist work Tout Va Bien (All is Well, 1972) and the audacious Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972).
Although Young Mr. Lincoln does, as some commentators have pointed out, sacrifice character development for a philosophy (which can suggest as argued, Rightist undercurrents) of landscape as mentioned above in the Deleuzean reading of American history and Ford, one must point out that it is precisely through sacrificing character (a detail in the narrative construct) or other fine details that a philosophy of the landscape can emerge through the cinematic image. Young Mr. Lincoln, which Ford often described as his ‘favourite movie’ does this inimitably well and builds up Ford’s visual syntax that he would continue to explore in his future Fonda collaborations: the 1941 Steinbeck adaptation Grapes of Wrath and the masterful My Darling Clementine (1946).
References:
1) John Ford, The Man and His Movies, Tad Gallagher,1988
2) Richard Franklin, Senses of Cinema
3) Cinema 1; Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze, Les Edition De Minuits, 1985