YOUNG MR. LINCOLN

 One of John Ford's very best films and although it's admired, it's never really been given its due. It's homespun Americana and it's also mostly fiction, dealing as it does with Lincoln's supposed first case as a lawyer defending two young settlers on a murder charge. Real life characters such as Ann Rutledge and even future wife Mary Todd flit by; Abe aside almost everyone else is an invention of screenwriter Lamar Trotti's imagination. Of course, you have to have a taste for this kind of material; the po' folks simplicity is laid on pretty thick and perhaps only Ford could make it work which he certainly does, helped in no small measure by a terrific performance from Henry Fonda as Lincoln.

Unlike Raymond Massey or even Daniel Day-Lewis, Fonda never adopts the mannerisms of Lincoln, the statesman. His is an easy-going, laidback Lincoln spouting those homespun epigrams so beloved of Ford and doing it beautifully; it's a great piece of acting. There's also a splendid supporting turn from Donald Meeks as the dogged prosecutor in the films lengthy trial scene which basically takes up the last quarter of the picture and is as good as any courtroom scene in American movies. The great Alice Brady, in her last role, (she died not long after the film was completed, at the age of forty-six), is the mother of the boys on trial but in the end this is Fonda's film and, of course, Ford's; they really do compliment each other.