Cinema: The New Pictures Sep. 8, 1930

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Abraham Lincoln (United Artists). This is not a drama about Lincoln nor a portrait of him but a biographical sketch made of rapid, isolated sequences from his life. The approach is conventional, almost school-bookishly historical. In the producers' effort, often successful, to make a recognizable human being from the cryptic figure of Lincolnian anecdote, the audience is never allowed to forget that this human being was also the Savior of the Union. It is not the approach an artist would take; in taking it Director David Wark (Birth of a Nation) Griffith was thinking first of the boxoffice. And since there is nothing in public life today remotely approaching the Lincoln legend, .perhaps Director Griffith's judgment was as good from the patriotic as from the financial point of view. Moreover, perhaps the schoolbook Lincoln is essentially the great Lincoln.

First important picture made in six years by Director Griffith, its old-fashioned technique is surprising at first, until you begin to feel it appropriate to the subject in hand. Often the transition from one crisis in Lincoln's career to another is so abrupt as to seem superficial. In part this is because of the limitations which program-time impose on the film's structure (it lasts only 100 minutes). The dialog by Poet Stephen Vincent Benet is less a factor in the picture's success than the masterly acting of Walter Huston in the title role. Sometimes in appearance he is a double for the familiar pictures of Lincoln—; sometimes, particularly in the earlier scenes as the backwoods lawyer without the beard and the weary dignity that characterized the President, one could not tell who he was meant to be if subordinate persons did not constantly (almost too often) call him Abe. At all times however, his acting proves that he has thought out the part and made every gesture and intonation consistent with his conception of it. Ian Keith, as the half-mad, half-drunk actor-assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is as macabre and satanic as a character by Edgar Allan Poe; General Grant (E. Alyn Warren) is good too. Disappointments are the too-pious Robert E. Lee and too-coy Una Merkel as Ann Rutledge.

Good shots: Lincoln dancing with his future wife at a party where Stephen Arnold Douglas is the leading stag; Lincoln called home to supper by his children just as he is receiving the presidential nomination in his Springfield law-office; Lincoln telling his cabinet he is going to take Fort Sumter; Lincoln walking in the White House halls in his stocking feet because he has insomnia; a long line of telegraphers getting despatches from the fighting line; General Philip Henry Sheridan and his staff in their wild gallop to reorganize their broken army cutting, in a flash of steel and a streamer of dust, across the corner of a cornfield; the assassination.