Mr. Ford on Mr. Lincoln

John Ford made several undeniable masterpieces during his half-century of directing from 1917 to 1966. "Young Mr. Lincoln" is not one of those masterpieces, but it is a great film in its own right. Concerning the life of Abraham Lincoln during his tenure as a lawyer in mid-1830s Illinois, Ford's film is based much less on historical fact than on a mythologized view of the man who would come to be one of our greatest presidents.\nThis point-of-view would be detrimental to anyone attempting to get to the bottom of what made a great man tick, but Ford wasn't interested in such introspection. Instead, we get a genial portrait of Lincoln's younger years, complete with excellent cinematography and assured pacing and direction from a man who would soon become as much a legend in Hollywood as Lincoln became countrywide.\nHenry Fonda portrays Lincoln as a mild-mannered fellow wise beyond not only his years, but his world. The supporting cast is well-rounded, but Fonda's Lincoln is as much the focal point of this film as Philip Seymour Hoffman's Capote was in "Capote." Filmed not long before he illuminated Tom Joad in Ford's best film, "The Grapes of Wrath," Fonda's performance is the sturdy axle on which the rest of "Young Mr. Lincoln" relies, and he delivers brilliantly. Bert Glennon and Arthur C. Miller's cinematography is another high point of this disc, presenting nature and the outdoors better than most DPs of their time.\nExtras on Criterion's double-disc treatment include an enlightening look into Ford's early film career produced by the BBC, archival audio interviews with Ford and Fonda on which they discuss the film in moderate depth, and a 28-page insert booklet boasting two invaluable write-ups on the film. The first essay, "A Hero in Waiting" by film critic Geoffrey O'Brien, cuts to the heart of "Young Mr. Lincoln" and its motivation, while the second, "Mr. Lincoln By Mr. Ford" (penned by late Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein before his death in 1948) is a wonderfully written, almost fanboy-ish account of how the film inspired his own work. The lack of a commentary track on disc one is distressing, but the restoration of this 1939 film is so crisp and vibrant that such an oversight (see: lack of a readily available film historian or Ford scholar) can be forgiven.\nDirector of such fervently loved American classics as "Stagecoach," "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Quiet Man," "The Searchers" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," John Ford made "Young Mr. Lincoln" on the cusp of his emergence as one of the great directors in history. His cinematic portrayal of Lincoln will be neither the last nor the most comprehensive. Steven Spielberg and Liam Neeson will likely take their crack at Honest Abe in the near-future, and while the resulting film will almost certainly be monumental, Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln," and namely Henry Fonda's methodical take on the President as a young man, is a fitting primer for such an endeavor.