Cinema: New Picture: Jun. 12, 1939

Young Mr. Lincoln (Twentieth Century-Fox). The world should little note, nor long remember the story of Young Mr. Lincoln, for if it does, history may have to take a back seat. It is as if Darryl F. Zanuck had signed Mr. Lincoln to play in a swift, humorous, bathetic little piece of last century fiction. The result is an ingenuous jumble of history and fancy, its main theme being the story of how young Lawyer Lincoln, at 30, won his famous murder case with the help of the moon and a farmer’s almanac, a trial that actually took place when Lincoln was nearing 50.

The story book version of that trial generally sounds slightly McGuffey; Hollywood’s vast inflation of it is louder and funnier and off its historical base in almost every particular. Cinemauthor Lamar Trotti last week explained: “When I was working as a reporter on the Atlanta Georgian, I covered a murder trial and became very interested in the accused man and his family. I’ve always wanted to do a story about them, and this is it. . . . It’s really only a whodunit. . . .”

In this short-circuit of Lincoln legend, the cinemaudience meets Ann Rutledge in the first five minutes, pauses at her gravestone five minutes later. Abe Lincoln rides into Springfield from New Salem in frock coat and stovepipe on a mule, cuts his own hair, thrums a jews-harp, halts a lynching of his first clients with the argument that the mob is trying to do him out of his first retainer. He wins a tug-of-war against the Hog Wallow boys by hitching the anchor loop of the rope to a wagon, dances with Mary Todd, generally establishes himself as a capable, dryly humorous, lonely citizen. Then the trial takes over, for three reels of howling prairie jurisprudence, wry Lincoln homespun and Hollywood crossexamination. Only at the fade-out is there a hint that this gangly local yokel is headed anywhere. “Just going up the hill a piece,” says he, parting from a companion and up he goes, into a lowering thunderstorm.

To play this pleasing young Mr. Lincoln, tall, spare Actor Henry Fonda stayed home nights to read up on the part, acted Lincolnesque on the set and off. During the filming he walked on three-inch stilts built into his boots, wore a rubber buildup on his nose and an applied wart on his right cheek. Director John Ford (The Informer) refused to see Fonda without his makeup, refused to let superProducer Darryl F. Zanuck dabble in the job, turned out, as a result, a jim-dandy piece of Lincoln mythology.

First of a series of Lincoln films in what Hollywood freely predicts will be Lincoln’s greatest year, Young Mr. Lincoln was spotlighted during production by a restraining suit. Robert Emmet Sherwood and his partners in Playwrights Producing Co. Inc. filed the suit on the ground that there was more than coincidence in the similarity in name to Abe Lincoln in Illinois (Broadway hit to be filmed this summer with Raymond Massey). Darryl Zanuck parried that by producing a memo proving that Lincoln was in his thoughts as far back as 1935.

In keeping with the present Hollywood urge to return to the mise en scéne, Young Mr. Lincoln had a world première on Decoration Day in the Fox-Lincoln Theatre in Springfield. Two trainloads of guest critics, Hollywood columnists and cinema stars attended, Springfield fat-purses paid $3.30 for orchestra seats, the rest paid the usual 40¢. All heard Negro Contralto Marian Anderson, hired by Producer Zanuck for $6,000, sing America. Only complaint Springfield had against the film was that Abe Lincoln arrived in Springfield not on muleback, but on horseback.