TELEVISION: Birthday Gift

The title—Meet Mr. Lincoln—was so modest that for TV it was no title at all. And the NBC cameras did little more than browse through history's old photograph albums. Yet the result was one of the year's best documentaries.

In skillful succession, the show mounted more than 500 contemporary photographs, cartoons and drawings. The ever-changing face of Lincoln was there, from the casual pictures of him lounging on the doorstep in front of his Springfield home to the later famous studies by Photographer Matthew Brady. Producer Donald B. Hyatt and Scriptwriter Richard Hanser presented a fine narration and a solid frame for the portrait of their hero. Around him were arrayed the hopeless black faces of the slaves, the hard young faces of soldiers from both sides, the rabid faces of anti-Lincoln editors and politicians. By crosscutting as fast as eight times a second in the war scenes, the show managed to give static drawings much of the fluency of front-line movie clips, but the effect was far more restful (and hence arresting) to eye and mind.

The technique had been used before, notably in art movies and by Omnibus' The Death of Manolete, but rarely with such success. It was a measure of the program's sure touch that Lincoln's death, in contrast to so vivid a life, seemed almost anticlimactic.