Character assassination

Abraham Lincoln

(1930)

D. W. Griffith was only in his 50s when he made his first talkie, so he shouldn't have been in his dotage yet, but what better explanation is there for how awful this is? I suppose it's possible that he was just as unprepared as the director in Singin' in the Rain to make the shift to sound. Maybe the likeliest explanation is that the unreconstructed Rebel, while recognizing that an out-and-out slander of Honest Abe would be anathema to most of his audience, subversively took his revenge on the Great Emancipator by making him unspeakably boring. But for some of Lincoln's own words and a game performance by Walter Huston, this would be absolutely unwatchable.

The only marginally dramatic moment in the film--and, bizarrely, the only Civil War action sequence--is Sheridan's ride, a minor episode hyperbolized into a turning point by a hack poet so that schoolboys of my generation would have doggerel other than Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" to memorize.