Last semester, when my film teacher said that after the advent of sound, American films had virtually no influence on filmmaking stylistically, my immediate reaction was “What about John Ford?” Ford was the biggest and most successful director of the old studio system, and also somehow managed to be one of the most artistic. He worked primarily on Westerns, though in his 115+ movies (no kidding), he branched out a little. Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) might be considered one of his departures, though it has the distinct flavor of a John Ford film.

Young Mr. Lincoln is a primarily fictional tale about a court case in Springfield. Abe (Henry Fonda), having recently moved to town from New Salem but already popular in Springfield, stops a lynch mob and demands that two alleged murderers be given a fair trial, in a scene straight out of a Western. He decides to defend the two young men, the odds against whom are seemingly insurmountable.

Lincoln is presented as a simple man, even a country bumpkin, and exceedingly kind. He participates in every event in the Springfield Independence Day celebration, gets along with nearly everybody in town, and dislikes the pompousness of politics. His morals are derived from a country life of farming, based on the moral absolutes of good and bad, right and wrong. Whether this was true of the real man or not I cannot say, but the myth of the man is what is important here.

That’s what Ford did throughout the course of his career: capture the epic American myths on film. Whether it was the myth of his own ancestral past (The Quiet Man), the myth of the Depression (The Grapes of Wrath), or the myth of the Wild West (every other film he ever made, basically), Ford dealt purely in modern mythological tales, capturing the feeling or perception of events and people, if not the reality. Abraham Lincoln may be the greatest of all American myths, a great man from simple origins whose legacy has made him bigger than life. From Mount Rushmore to the Lincoln Memorial to the five-dollar bill, his face and deeds are ingrained into the American consciousness more than any other President. Ford, whose heroes always drip with morality and simplicity, was the perfect director to tell a story about such a man.

John Ford’s movies also deal in a strange way with masculinity. I read a biography on him once that suggested he may have been a repressed homosexual, but I don’t agree with that. I do agree, however, that he was insecure about his artistic tendencies, worried that his eye for a pleasing image emasculated him. Even his most gentle and wise characters are defined as worthy men by their mastery of violence. This is particularly noticeable in The Quiet Man, where a man (John Wayne) who has sworn off violence is not worthy of his wife until he rediscovers his fighting skills. In Young Mr. Lincoln, Lincoln defeats the mob not only with his wit, but by reminding the mob that “I can lick any man here.” At another point in the film, he again defuses an ugly situation with a threat of violence. It doesn’t hurt the film very much, but it seems just a tad out of character, a way for Ford to qualify Lincoln as a “man.”

The film suffers from some Hollywood nonsense. The majority of the court scenes are predictable and seem to drag on for just that reason, with a far-too-convenient ending. There is also a scene where Abe writes the song “Dixie,” which was almost as ridiculous as the scene in which Jesus invents the modern table in The Passion of the Christ. But overall, between the appeal of the myth of Lincoln and Ford’s beatuiful images, it is an enjoyable and stirring film, a must-see for all you John Ford and Henry Fonda fans out there.