Abraham Lincoln (1930)

I gave this a chance after enjoying Upton Sinclair's Manassas, and got sucked in by the excellent miniature shots that open and close the film. Unfortunately everything in-between is inert pap with no purpose or perspective. Griffith may have given us the pan and the…

Jack Often

Andrew Sarris's "Pantheon" entry for D.W. Griffith in The American Cinema (1968) It is about time that D.W. Griffith was rescued from the false pedestal of an outmoded pioneer. The cinema of Griffith is no more outmoded, after all, than the drama of Aeschylus. When one…

Not Andrew Sarris

"I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I…

Jacob

An amiable, creaky hagiography that gains something from being so old it almost looks like it dates from the mid 19th century. A Civil War battle scene near the end serves as a reminder of an era of Griffith’s career in which he was capable of rousing excitement. The…

Will Sloan

Abraham Lincoln was D.W. Griffith's debut sound film, one in which he insisted he'd directed outright himself. Par for most of Griffith's films, the film is a mixed bag, a thorn in its history, but also inevitably shaped by the social and artistic contexts of its time.…

legolas

Abraham Lincoln has been covered in countless biopics, yet this is the very first one that was created with synchronized sound. This one can be marked among the many decent flicks from the 30's. As an action junkie I appreciated the dated enactments of the Civil War that…

𝕭laze the 𝓐ction 𝕵unkie

Lincoln as a bruised man, forever haunted, sleepwalking barefoot in the white house in his pajamas seemingly supporting the weight of the world on his shoulders. 'Why can't I hold on to anything?'

Diogo Serafim

ReBirth of a Nation “Now he belongs to the ages.” - Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War. This “Abraham Lincoln” biopic is hardly as bad as one might fear given it’s director D.W. Griffith’s penultimate production, when his career was in obvious decline, constrained…

Cineanalyst

Pokes in the eye every hagiographic political biography ever to believe that their subject was more than human (all too human). One of Griffith’s top three features.

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