Abraham Lincoln (1930)

(On TV, April 2021) It doesn’t take a lot of knowledge about early Hollywood history to understand D.W. Griffith’s importance in the evolution of American cinema: He was one of the pioneers who moved his troupe out west from Fort Lee to Los Angeles, thus precipitating the creation of Hollywood as we knew it. His two best-known films are acknowledged silent cinema landmarks, even if the most reprehensible of them presents the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. But D.W. Griffith’s place in the sun did not survive the arrival of sound in movies: He only made two sound features, and when they’re compared to other films of the era, they definitely show Griffith being overtaken by younger directors more comfortable with the audiovisual possibilities of cinema. Griffith’s innovation in putting together feature-length films and innovating the grammar of cinema was long Hollywood convention by 1930, and the step back in cinematography due to the cumbersome nature of sound-recording equipment is quite obvious here. The camera shots are largely static, filmed like a play rather than the kind of more dynamic camera movements that even contemporaries were using at the time. As far as the portrayal of Lincoln goes, the film is more entertaining early on, as it shows Lincoln as a young man living a tumultuous life than later on when Lincoln becomes a quasi-saintly figure doomed to assassination after freeing the slaves. Not being a Lincoln scholar, I’m told that the film gets more wildly inaccurate as it goes on. But historical accuracy takes a back-seat to the rough technical aspects of the production: ironically, the fact that it’s a talking picture means that our appreciation of the film is more based on decades of sound movies rather than the short period during which silent films were the norm. The melodramatic style, stilted dialogue and stiff filmmaking technique don’t really help in making the result any more interesting. Walter Huston is interesting in the titular role, but the film itself is a chore to get through even at barely more than a 90-minute running time. There’s a sobering thought that by 1930, there were still Civil War veterans who could watch the film, but from 2021 the result is of historical interest far more than straight-up film entertainment.