Abraham Lincoln

... "personally directed" by D. W. Griffith. Walter Huston stars as Lincoln, shown from his birth through his rough-and-tumble early years, his doomed romance with Ann Rutledge (Una Merkel), his marriage to the eccentric Mary Todd (Kay Hammond), and his election to the presidency, where he presided over the U. S. Civil War, during which he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, before being felled by an assassin's bullet.

Like most of Griffith's movies, this is a mixed bag of interesting choices, corny populism, and a rose-colored vision of the past. I was surprised by the opening of the film, set aboard a trans-Atlantic slave ship, featuring slave traders coldly discussing their remaining "inventory" as they toss a dead African overboard. As this was one of a few scenes missing its audio, I have a feeling it was often cut out during exhibition.

I was confused by Griffith's decision to cast E. Alyn Warren as both Stephen Douglas and Ulysses Grant: were there not enough qualified actors around? I liked seeing silent film stalwarts Hobart Bosworth and Henry B. Walthall as General Robert E. Lee and his attendant colonel, respectively. I liked Walter Huston as Honest Abe, and was surprised by how much he looked like the photographs of Lincoln in the last third of the film.

The biopic elements themselves are simplistic and hagiographic, and things seemed rushed, trying to tell his entire life story in 90 minutes. I was not a fan of Hammond as Mary Todd, and felt she dragged the proceedings down quite a bit.