Young Mr. Lincoln : between myth and history in 1939

Abstract

Upon its release, contemporary critics hailed Young Mr. Lincoln as a landmark in American historical cinema. Terry Ramsaye, the elder statesman of film history, commented in The Motion Picture Herald : 'The like of this picture in the nature of its story concept has never before been offered outside the art cinemas.' According to Ramsaye, Young Mr. Lincoln achieved something unique in historical film-making. It not only recorded historical events or document Lincoln's life, but assumed the audience's knowledge and moved beyond to a more subtle engagement with the past. In the ensuing six decades, no one within the disciplines of either film studies or history has pursued Ramsaye's insight. Indeed, subsequent readings have denied or dismissed the film's historical nature. This essays restores Young Mr. Lincoln 's self-conscious historical discourse by first examining the Lincoln tradition in classical Hollywood cinema best exemplified in 1939 by Lincoln in the White House and Abe Lincoln in Illinois , and then reconstructs Young Mr. Lincoln 's production history, its studied deviations from the repertoire of Lincoln film-making, and its unique response to contemporary historical writing. In fusing production film history with an analysis of early twentieth-century American historiography, this approach also introduces new meaning to the term film historiography . In the context of this paper, film historiography refers to the attitude towards history articulated by Young Mr. Lincoln 's principal film-makers on paper and on screen, and this attitude's relationship to debates in contemporary academic and popular history. The results of this analysis suggest a fundamental revision of much scholarly writing on historical cinema within both the disciplines of film studies and history, one which recognizes a complex and deliberately constructed historiographic vision within certain classical Hollywood films.