Abraham Lincoln (1930)

D. W. Griffith’s biography of Abraham Lincoln was his first foray into the world of the talkies, and bugger me, is it a talkie! But yet, at the same time, not talkie enough. It lurches wildly back and forth from traditional silent film fare to awkward scenes of dialogue typical of very early sound films, with a stationary camera fixed on two people trying desperately not to move lest it be picked up on the primitive microphones.

Limited by new technology, yet driven by the commercial hysteria behind the fad of sound, one can hardly blame the director for such problems, but we don’t have to look far to find a big pile of other things we can blame him for. Despite being something of a pioneer of the silent era, with his controversial but popular epics The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance being particularly revered, Griffith seems to have hardly developed in the 15 years since and it isn’t hard to imagine this film seeming old fashioned even by the standards of 1930. Silent film, by the end of its reign, had developed into quite a sophisticated art form, and none of that sophistication is seen here even in the scenes where the restrictions of on-set sound are forgone.

Doing exactly what it says on the tin, Abraham Lincoln tells the story of the famed beardy bloke, from his youth to his time as US President, which saw him leading the Northern states in a civil war, freeing some slaves, then getting shot by an angry theatre patron. The content is all there, perhaps too much of it, presumably word-for-word from American school textbooks of the age.

This is a film without coherence, a director without a vision, who seems to be feeling his way through like a blind man at an orgy (yes, I’ve watched Naked Gun 33 1/3 recently… but I digress). The script is stage play dialogue attached to an epic film story (a combination that never works) and the patchwork style make this very difficult to watch. It isn’t all bad news though; Walter Huston, although often let down by the fumbling technical work, gives a creditable performance as Abe, and a brief scene of a dance near the middle of the film shows some technical merit… but that’s about it.

Don’t let the restrictions of the time excuse this film; all-time masterpieces of cinema were made several years before this, and others had gotten to grips with sound much better even before Griffith had started on Abraham Lincoln. No, this was a director who had stayed still while the craft he had helped to define had passed him by. He would only make one more feature after this, and that might have been one too many.

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