Uncouth Reflections

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

This bit from “Young Mr. Lincoln” is probably my favorite passage in all of John Ford. It’s Ford at his most Griffithesque; it’s similar in a number of ways to Griffith’s light pastoral works, the great “True Heart Susie” among them. But there’s a heaviness to it as well — a foreboding, almost Germanic quality that lends an unexpected severity to the all-American subject matter. I can think of few movie scenes that convey the ebb and flow of life in such a concise and eloquent manner. The camera movement, echoing the flow of the river. The jarring but inevitable shift from summer to winter. The softly lapping rings in the water. The way the limb of that big, darker-than-night tree tells us all we need to know about the tender but ill-fated connection between these two people. All of it works to mythologize Lincoln in terms that are eerily universal. The moment when Henry Fonda musters enough courage to declare that he likes red hair is the one at which Ford decides to shoot him head-on and from a low angle. Suddenly the everyman Abe looks halfway presidential — perhaps even ominous. Yet the sentiment he’s expressing isn’t presidential at all — it’s personal, idiosyncratic, delicately ardent. Here Ford is telling us something about the simple life experiences that lurk behind the images we present to the world. Credit is owed to composer Alfred Newman, whose score is varied and sensitive enough to sustain the scene’s complicated network of feelings.