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  • Featured Movies
    • 12 Years a Slave (2013)
    • 1941 (Spielberg) >
      • 1941: Part 2
    • Affair of the Necklace
    • Alice's Restaurant: best of the American counterculture movies?
    • Army of Crime
    • Army of Shadows
    • The Artist >
      • 'The Artist':2
    • Anthropoid: the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 1942: Four Very Different Movies >
      • Hangmen Also Die: Hollywood meets emigres from Nazi Germany
    • Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    • Battle of the Rails ( La bataille du rail)
    • Belle (2014)
    • Bhowani Junction
    • Blackboard Jungle >
      • Blackboard Jungle Pt.2
    • Carry On Up the Khyber
    • Charlie Wilson's War
    • The City Across the River
    • The Counterculture : best movies about the American counterculture era
    • Custer - two contrasting movie portrayals: "They Died With Their Boots On" and "Little Big Man" >
      • They Died With Their Boots On
      • Stalin and the Movies >
        • Stalin, Disney, Eisenstein, & Ivan the Terrible
      • Death of Stalin
      • Little Big Man (1970)
    • Dark Knight Rises >
      • Dark Knight Rises Pt.2
    • The Deceivers
    • Diplomacy / Diplomatie (2014) movie
    • Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan's epic movie
    • El Cid
    • The Enigma Machine : four movies about the Enigma machine
    • Generation War >
      • Generation War: Jazz and the Swing Kids
      • Generation War: German women and the war
    • The Great Gatsby On the Big Screen
    • Gunga Din
    • A Hard Day's Night: Influences on the Movie
    • Hemingway & Gellhorn >
      • Martha Gellhorn >
        • Women war correspondents
    • Hyde Park on Hudson
    • The Imitation Game (2014) >
      • The Imitation Game Part 2: the truth about Turing and the Bletchley 'Bombe'. >
        • The Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley and the Colossus >
          • Imitation Game: Turing, Bletchley Park and the Soviet spy
    • The Inner Circle (1991)
    • Is Paris Burning? >
      • Is Paris Burning? General von Choltitz
    • KIng of the Khyber Rifles
    • Kim
    • Léon Morin, Priest
    • Les Miserables (2012) >
      • Les Miserables in Movies: Fantine the grisette >
        • Les Miserables 3: guide to some historical references
    • "Les Misérables": Claude Lelouch updates a classic
    • Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
    • The Long Duel
    • Looking at Lincoln - Spielberg's "Lincoln" & its predecessors and influences >
      • Spielberg's Lincoln
      • Abraham Lincoln: D.W. Griffith's version
      • Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
      • Abe Lincoln in Illinois
    • Mandingo (1975) Dir: Richard Fleischer
    • The Man Who Would Be King
    • Marie Antoinette (2006)
    • Marie-Antoinette / Shadow of the Guillotine
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      • Marie Antoinette (1938) Pt.2
    • Mayerling
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      • Midnight in Paris:2 >
        • Midnight in Paris:3
    • The Monuments Men (2014) Dir: George Clooney
    • North West Frontier / Flame Over India
    • La Nuit de Varennes - a post-modern take on a key episode in the French Revolution
    • Le Pere Tranquille (The Quiet Father) 1946
    • Peterloo: MIke Leigh's New Movie >
      • Peterloo2
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      • Pompeii (2014) Paul W.S. Anderson director
    • Rebel Without a Cause
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    • Woman in Gold >
      • Woman in Gold Pt.2: the Vienna Scene in early 20th Century Vienna
    • Un village française: French TV series
    • Waterloo: the movie about Napoleon's final battle
    • Zabriskie Point
  • Places
    • Settings: the North West Frontier
    • Movies Set in the North-West Frontier >
      • Thuggees
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    • Events That Inspired Movies 2
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      • Pt2:The Girl Can't Help It
  • Free State of Jones
  • Great Wall (2017)
  • Rogue One & World War 2
  • Hollywood and anti-Americanism in a small country: Amercan movies & their critics in New Zealand 1916 - 1956
    • New Zealanders' Love of Movies 1900s-1956
    • Campaign against Hollywood movies in New Zealand
    • Campaign against HollywoodPt 2
  • Hollywood versus Pinewood Pt2
  • New Zealanders and Movies: the Enigmatic Gordon Mirams: film critic, film censor and public intellectual
  • Aryan Papers: Stanley Kubrick's Proposed Movie

Abe Lincoln in Illinois  (Dir: John Cromwell)

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The movie was based on Robert Sherwood's popular and critical Broadway success. Both  cinema posters above heavily emphasize its  genesis in the Sherwood play. Sherwood's play became a staple of the American stage for years; the movie failed but Massey's stage and cinematic portrayal of Lincoln unfortunately helped stereotype Lincoln as a speechifying and rather staid man, rather remote from ordinary people.
Abe LIncoln in Illinois was released less than a year after the success of  director John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln. Although John Cromwell's cinematic version of the Lincoln story was based on Robert Sherwood's Broadway hit and Pulitzer Prize winning play, and featured Raymond Massey's repeating his highly-praised theatrical portrayal of Lincoln, the movie was a financial disaster for RKO studios. Viewed today, it comes across as static, verbose and gloomy. Compared with Ford's take on Lincoln, Cromwell's movie is inferior in almost every respect except cinematography.
Yet Abe LIncoln in Illinois was an important and influential movie. Why?

Raymond Massey's Lincoln established a lasting visual template of Lincoln the man


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The Canadian actor Raymond Massey's portrayal of Lincoln was highly praised when Robert Sherwood's play Abe Lincoln in Illinois was a Broadway hit during the late 1930s. It has been performed many times since. His performance in the film version was also well received by critics, gaining him an Academy Award nomination. Massey reprised his stage performance when he toured the play and frequently repeated his role in later TV and movie productions. And 16mm prints of the movie were for years frequently shown in classrooms across America. Consequently, although Abe Lincoln in Illinois  flopped at the movie box-office, Massey's depiction of the President was eventually seen by millions and became embedded in the public mind. 
In many respects Massey was ideally suited to play the role of Lincoln. Physically, he resembled Lincoln. Massey was tall (6'3"), thin, long in the face, saturnine. He had a commanding presence. His impressive oratorical skills came from stage experience ranging from Shakespeare to Greek tragedy. 
Unfortunately, both Sherwood's play (on which the screenplay is based) and Massey's performance depict Lincoln as inherently solemn, meditative, unbending and dignified. This Lincoln is lacking a sense of humor and more importantly, a sense of humanity. This is what we would call a politically correct portrayal of Lincoln - just a bit self-righteous, sober and lacking the common touch. He's  a bit of a bore - well-intentioned, a man of rectitude, but almost too good to be true. This is not a Lincoln who can laugh at himself or interact effectively with others, as in Henry Fonda's more convincing and enjoyable depiction. It's significant that the Lincoln of Illinois is most convincing, and the film is most interesting, in the scenes with Mary Todd, played by Ruth Gordon as embittered and demanding. On this basic human level it becomes easy to empathize with Lincoln and to feel a sense of astonishment that he had deal with a dysfunctional family life as well as preserve the Union and wage a civil war.
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Abe Lincoln in Illinois gives some prominence to the fraught relationship between Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd, above left. It also focuses on Lincoln's grief over the death of his presumed 'first love', Ann Rutledge. But above all, unfortunately, both the movie and Massey's portrayal depict Lincoln as a stern,depressed, rather forbidding person (above right). This impression of the President has prevailed in the public mind, and overshadows Lincoln's  more complicated and humane  personality, especially his homespun sense of humor and bluff common sense.
SPIELBERG'S  "LINCOLN"
GRIFFITH'S "ABRAHAM LINCOLN"
FORD'S "YOUNG MR LINCOLN"