One of the worst waits I have experienced for something was a wasted day spent at the local Social Security office. All I needed to do was change my email address they had on file, and bureaucracy mandated this could only be done in person. I was there before the office opened for the day and received a line number which was never called. I was told to come back another day.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that incident while watching 1940’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois. And I was recalling that unpleasant experience because I cannot recall another time I was so bored watching a movie that it felt like spending a day in a government office. It is a seemingly interminable 110 minutes.
Admittedly, it would be an uphill battle for me to have a strong interest in such a historical drama. Still, it was the Fourth of July and, despairing over a horrible Federal budget bill passed that day, I was looking for something to rekindle a spirit of earlier American patriotism.
Instead, what I got was a Cliff Notes version of Lincoln’s life up to when he becomes president. So, this is largely the boring stuff before then. I really should have paid closer attention to the title and the “In Illinois” part.
Events don’t seem to occur organically so much as check off another item on a list. At worst, I was expecting a hagiography. But what happens here didn’t even rise to my low expectations, and feels more like an elementary school pageant. At times, I imaged a child awkwardly narrating the film, saying such lines as, “Then Abe Lincoln was recruited by the Whig party in hopes he could be a populist figure in a party that was thought to be stuffy and aristocratic.” I can picture an auditorium full of people struggling to stay awake. That is, except the obligatory helicopter parents rabidly trying to capture every second on this performance on their phones.
Raymond Massey plays Lincoln. I loved him as Cary Grants’s psychopathic fugitive of a brother in Arsenic and Old Lace. Because he is so thoroughly entrenched in my mind as being that character, I had a difficult time accepting him as the Great Emancipator. I kept waiting for him to declare in stentorian tones, “There are four score and seven dead bodies in the cellar.” I had an even more difficult time believing he was a young Lincoln at the beginning of the film, given his distinctly cadaverous visage. This is a man who is way too old to still be living with his parents in that era. In today’s gig economy, however…
It didn’t help the movie starts out so folksy. Charles Middleton and Elisabeth Risdon are awfully folksy as Ma and Pa, she knowin’ Massey will make something of hisself and Pa havin’ no truck with that book learnin’. Massey gets a job on a flatboat taking a huge load of pigs up the river. The single most exciting moment in the runtime is that boat going over a low-level dam and the porkers spilling overboard and swimming to shore. There, the men run around frantically trying to overtake these porcine fugitives (aka “pigitives”). This is how Massey runs into Ann Rutledge, as played by Mary Howard. The town she lives in is New Salem, so I was hoping she’d take precautions to ensure they don’t brand her a witch.
He is obviously smitten, but he first has to stand up to Howard Da Silva, a drunken bully who throws his weight all around the town. Massey will defeat him in a fight which is messy enough at times to feel realistic. His win earns the respect of everybody in town. He’s even made a friend for life in Da Silva. Massey is then immediately roped into being clerk for an election the town just happens to be staging that very day. Once again, this scans like nothing more than a list of points in Lincoln’s life to be acknowledged before moving to the next. I think seeing the film as a series of Viewmaster slides, as that would have had the same impact.
More such plot points will have Massey working in the town’s general store, then being given ownership of the store, then being recruited to fight the Native Americans, then apparently not actually going into active combat. Then Howard dies, then the Whigs recruit Massey, then he quits the government before it seems he even attends a single legislative session, then he becomes a legal clerk, then he woos Ruth Gordon as Mary Todd and blah blah blah blah.
It doesn’t help that Massey’s Lincoln seems to have no initiative. Like piglets carried away in that river’s current earlier in the runtime, the plot has him simply drawn into one situation after another, and frequently he only does so reluctantly. I don’t know if that is how the future president was in real life, nor do I care. If his nature did not make for a person for whom we should feel a vested interest, then his life is not suitable for a dramatic adaptation. I don’t care to find the exact line in the script, but a character nails the problem with our central character when they say something along the lines of “He’s most undecidedest creature you ever saw.”
Nor did I feel like spending any more time with any of the other characters. I am aware of the bewilderment past and present regarding why Abe would marry a woman as seemingly dour and humorless as Mary Todd. As played by an impossibly young Gordon, she starts out as witty and even a bit playful. Then, apparently as soon as they get married, she becomes a far less pleasant individual. Nothing substantial is shown for this change to have occurred, it is simply that the script mandates this personality flip.
But she doesn’t become as flat-out depressed as Massey, who looks to border on suicidal when he wins the presidential election. This darkening of his already somber demeanor is foreshadowed by this line from him as the votes are being tabulated: “If I win, I have to fulfil all the dishonest pledges made in my name.” To the Republicans, he may be a party man, but there’s a reason nobody ever described him as a party animal.
And, if he’s so worried about the corruption of politics, maybe he should have been more concerned about Da Silva intimidating people into voting for his friend in an earlier election. Afterwards, the thug even says he’s going to hunt down the three voters brave enough to submit their ballots for the other candidate. Everybody laughs, as if one can truly joke about election interference and voter intimidation. It is easy to imagine this character storming the Capitol in January of 2020.
I won’t pretend to know more about our 16th president than that provided in the token, high-level overview given in the standard public school education. Still, I came away from the didactic Abe Lincoln in Illinois feeling I now somehow know less about the man. I definitely did expect to be left with the impression this supposedly great man was without drive, simply letting fate take him where it must, to a place he least wanted to be. In a strange way, the film foretells a future where a great many leaders of the world, in politics and industry, many to fall upwards.
Dir: John Cromwell
Starring Raymond Massey, Gene Lockhart, Ruth Gordon, Mary Howard
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray