Hollywood's adaptation of Robert E Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is suitably serious and respectful of its subject matter. It has a slow methodical pace befitting Lincoln's manner of speaking and while interesting as a history lesson, struggles a little presented on the big screen.
Dubbed "the man from the wilderness", the viewer is presented with Honest Abe's back story as we see his rise from the backwoods culminating in his winning the election of 1860 as the presidential train takes him to Washington to begin his presidency. Being ignorant of his previous life-story, I was interested to learn of his love for another young woman before his eventual marriage or that he originally broke his later engagement to his wife Mary as he wrestled with accommodating her political ambitions for him to his own goals.
Naturally, there are speeches a-plenty as everyone around him, besides Mary, with their different motivations, identify in the slow-talking, easy-going Illinois lawyer a man who could make it to the White House. To the man and woman in the street, his popular appeal comes from his couching his radical policy of emancipation in relatable but memorable words, while to the political machinery of backroom politics, he is thought a pliable rube who will do the party's bidding. Although the film ends before he actually assumes the presidency, we're left in little doubt that in the end, Abe is his own man, as much from the way he rebukes his wife for dressing him down in public as from the set-piece debate with rival candidate Stephen Douglas.
I love my history, especially regarding the American presidency but must admit I found this biopic somewhat flat and laboured in its presentation of events even as I appreciated the re-statement of equal rights and the abolition of slavery at such a precipitous time in then present-day America, in the wake of the Great Depression and with the spectre of World War ahead where the contribution of black Americans would prove essential to the war effort.
Raymond Massey well personifies the iconoclastic Lincoln and Ruth Gordon, here in her first film but much more familiar to me as her older self in 70's TV series like "MacMillan and Wife" and "Rhoda", is already cultivating her endearing waspishness as the forceful woman behind this great man.
All in all, while I appreciated the sober treatment of the serious subject matter, I nonetheless felt it could have done with some enlivening and even lightening to make it play better as a movie entertainment.
Dubbed "the man from the wilderness", the viewer is presented with Honest Abe's back story as we see his rise from the backwoods culminating in his winning the election of 1860 as the presidential train takes him to Washington to begin his presidency. Being ignorant of his previous life-story, I was interested to learn of his love for another young woman before his eventual marriage or that he originally broke his later engagement to his wife Mary as he wrestled with accommodating her political ambitions for him to his own goals.
Naturally, there are speeches a-plenty as everyone around him, besides Mary, with their different motivations, identify in the slow-talking, easy-going Illinois lawyer a man who could make it to the White House. To the man and woman in the street, his popular appeal comes from his couching his radical policy of emancipation in relatable but memorable words, while to the political machinery of backroom politics, he is thought a pliable rube who will do the party's bidding. Although the film ends before he actually assumes the presidency, we're left in little doubt that in the end, Abe is his own man, as much from the way he rebukes his wife for dressing him down in public as from the set-piece debate with rival candidate Stephen Douglas.
I love my history, especially regarding the American presidency but must admit I found this biopic somewhat flat and laboured in its presentation of events even as I appreciated the re-statement of equal rights and the abolition of slavery at such a precipitous time in then present-day America, in the wake of the Great Depression and with the spectre of World War ahead where the contribution of black Americans would prove essential to the war effort.
Raymond Massey well personifies the iconoclastic Lincoln and Ruth Gordon, here in her first film but much more familiar to me as her older self in 70's TV series like "MacMillan and Wife" and "Rhoda", is already cultivating her endearing waspishness as the forceful woman behind this great man.
All in all, while I appreciated the sober treatment of the serious subject matter, I nonetheless felt it could have done with some enlivening and even lightening to make it play better as a movie entertainment.