The first known use of Lincoln’s image in a motion picture was in the 1901 Edison Film Company tableau film The Martyred Presidents, directed by Edwin S. Porter.Running only about 1 minute, the film shows a woman meant to represent the grieving United States sitting sorrowfully on an altar.  The altar flashes pictures of Lincoln, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley, all of the U.S. presidents that had been assassinated up to that point in history. The first known use of Lincoln’s image in a motion picture drama was in the 1903 film Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also produced by Edison and directed by Porter. The film was based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous anti-slavery novel of the same name (first published in 1851-52). An illustration of Lincoln freeing a slave was featured in a tableau shot at the close of the film, during Uncle Tom’s death scene. Lincoln’s image was symbolic of the freedom that would eventually be bestowed on all slaves. Obviously, the use of Lincoln in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an embellishment of the filmmakers, considering the fact that Stowe’s novel was originally published almost ten years before Lincoln was elected president.

  

From that point on, Lincoln was featured as a character in a steady stream of silent motion pictures. While some of these films presented Lincoln as their main subject, the majority were Civil War dramas that featured Lincoln as an incidental character. A great number of these dramas utilized Lincoln in the same familiar situation—he was shown granting a pardon to one of the other characters in the production, usually someone who had been unjustly sentenced to death by a military court. The characters in these films were mistakenly convicted for being rebel spies, or for accidentally falling asleep while on military guard duty, or for deserting their military posts due to circumstances beyond their control; Lincoln was able to save them all.

 

 Though many of these scenes were romanticized for dramatic effect, they did have basis in historical fact. During his administration, Lincoln did give audience to common citizens who often asked him to consider granting them pardons or favors because of hardships or special circumstances. Government documents from the Civil War period, many of them written in Lincoln’s own hand, show that he responded favorably to many such requests.

 

The silent film era gave rise to a number of remarkable Lincoln-related works. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 masterpiece The Birth of a Nation revolutionized the burgeoning motion picture industry with its skillful use of many cinematic techniques that modern audiences take for granted, such as editing and the use of close-up shots for dramatic effect. Joseph Henabery portrayed Lincoln in several sequences in the film, the most memorable being a superb recreation of his assassination at Ford’s Theatre.

 

Also, one of only two full-length motion pictures to present Lincoln’s life story from birth until death was produced during the late silent era. The 1924 film The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln starred George Billings in the title role, and though it was not without certain dramatic embellishments, it offered a thoroughly researched and lavishly produced depiction of Lincoln’s life and work. Interestingly, Billings had never acted in motion pictures before appearing in the film—he was hired for the role over a number of more experienced actors because of his great resemblance to Lincoln.

 

The first major motion picture to feature a synchronized optical soundtrack was the 1927 Warner Bros. production The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. The Jazz Singer created a sensation upon its release and left moviegoers clamoring for more “talking pictures.” Obviously, the advent of sound added not only entertainment value but also an entirely new dimension to the art of film, and the Lincoln screen portrayals that utilized this new technology reflected these changes. Lincoln’s story could now be told with words—words that went beyond the text that could be squeezed onto a title card.

 

The second, and to date the last, full-length big-screen attempt to chronicle Lincoln’s life from birth until death was D.W. Griffith’s 1930 sound motion picture Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was Griffith’s first sound film, as well as the second-to-last film that he ever directed. Unfortunately, it was marred by a number of artistic and technical problems. Griffith was well past his creative prime by the time that he made the motion picture,his demise in large part hastened by his steadily worsening alcoholism, and his shortcomings were made all the more apparent by the necessity of incorporating the new technology of sound into his work. Walter Huston portrayed Lincoln, but whatever merits might be found in his performance were far outweighed by Griffith’s tentative direction and the film’s childishly simplistic dialogue, in part fashioned by Griffith himself. Because of these problems with sound and script, Abraham Lincoln provided no more than a glimpse into the life and substance of its subject.

 

In the mid-1930s, Frank McGlynn, Sr., returned to the screen as Lincoln, most notably in the Civil War drama The Littlest Rebel starring Shirley Temple. In The Littlest Rebel’s climactic scene, reminiscent of the Lincoln-as-pardoner situation found in so many early silent films, Lincoln authorizes the release of a little girl’s father who has been unjustly sentenced to death for being a rebel spy. Though McGlynn’s heroic Lincoln in The Littlest Rebel was not an accurate recreation of the complex Lincoln of history, it was a perfect representation of what the Lincoln image had come to mean to many Americans, complete with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” playing solemnly in the background when he spoke.

 

McGlynn’s portrayal of Lincoln as a brilliant and powerful leader, while at the same time a kind and benevolent man, was so effective that he went on to play the part in well over a half dozen more films in the last half of the 1930s, earning him the distinction of being the actor who most frequently portrayed Lincoln in sound motion pictures. Like his appearance in The Littlest Rebel, most of McGlynn’s subsequent Lincoln film portrayals were in cameo or supporting roles. However, he did star as Lincoln in the excellent 1939 Warner Bros. patriotic short subject Lincoln in the White House.

 

Ironically, McGlynn’s numerous Lincoln portrayals during the 1930s would be almost completely overshadowed by the release of two films at the end of the decade. These two films were completed within several months of each other, and would virtually define Lincoln big-screen portrayals for mainstream audiences from their initial release until the present day. Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) both enjoyed critical success when they premiered, and they have remained the most widely screened and well-known Lincoln portrayals on film. It is unfortunate from a historian’s perspective that they have come to be regarded by many as the greatest Lincoln portrayals of all time, because although they are both well-crafted, entertaining dramas, they are also very poor historical pieces. And to make matters worse, these two films which disregard so many facts relating to Lincoln’s life usually receive an inordinate amount of attention in any discussion of Lincoln-related films and television programs because of their fame. The attention that is lavished upon these two works often comes at the expense of other, more deserving productions.

 

Young Mr. Lincoln starred Henry Fonda in the title role, and was directed by John Ford. Though the film’s opening scenes depicted Lincoln’s years in New Salem and his legendary romance with Ann Rutledge, it was primarily about fledgling lawyer Lincoln taking on his first big case in Springfield, a trial in which he successfully defends two brothers who are falsely accused of murder. The case was very loosely based on Lincoln’s defense of accused murderer Duff Armstrong in the celebrated 1858 trial. In that trial, the star witness lied about viewing the murder under the bright light of a full moon directly overhead; Lincoln produced an almanac which showed that the moon was actually very low in the sky at the time of the murder. Though the film is set at the time of Lincoln’s arrival in Springfield, the Duff Armstrong trial actually took place very late in Lincoln’s law career, not long before he was elected president.

 

Young Mr. Lincoln’s greatest historical failing was that it canonized Lincoln to the point where his image bore little resemblance to the actual flesh-and-blood Lincoln. Lincoln was presented as a mythical hero, not so much a man but a larger-than-life symbol of the American spirit. He splits rails, judges a pie contest, amuses his fellow citizens with funny stories and, of course, single-handedly saves two innocent young men from the gallows. While this made for fine, stirring drama, it painted a misleading portrait of what Abraham Lincoln was really like in life. Fonda’s performance in Young Mr. Lincoln accentuated the film’s canonization of Lincoln. He was slightly made-up for the part, but on the whole he looked and talked like a handsome movie actor, not like the homely, unusual-mannered Lincoln. From a historian’s point of view, Fonda’s portrayal, coupled with the film’s mythical interpretation of Lincoln, made Young Mr. Lincoln a very unsatisfying Lincoln screen biography.

 

Abe Lincoln in Illinois, directed by John Cromwell, was based on the play of the same name by Robert Sherwood. Sherwood also authored the film’s screenplay. Abe Lincoln in Illinois chronicled Lincoln’s life from the early 1830s when he first arrived in New Salem, until 1861 when he left Springfield for Washington, D.C. after being elected president. Raymond Massey portrayed Lincoln, as he did in the highly successful stage version of Abe which originally opened on Broadway in 1938. Though Massey’s likeness to Lincoln was striking, considerably better than Fonda’s, Abe Lincoln in Illinois was still every bit as historically lacking as Young Mr. Lincoln, mainly because of Sherwood’s script.

 

 

In it, Sherwood unfortunately chose to employ a number of popular myths regarding Lincoln’s life and work. For example, his relationship with Ann Rutledge is taken to ridiculously dramatic and unrealistic heights, with Abe holding her hand and professing his love for her as she dies. And his relationship with Mary Todd is misrepresented as well: She is portrayed as a bitter, scheming woman who ruthlessly pushes her husband on to greater professional and political success. Unbelievably, Lincoln is portrayed as only wanting nothing more out of Mary and his life than to be left alone, but he resigns himself to a personal and political fate that he knows will only bring him sorrow and tragedy. The real Lincoln’s well-documented intense ambition is nowhere to be found in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, replaced by a hopelessness and an overexaggerated sense of duty.

 

After Young Mr. Lincoln and Abe Lincoln in Illinois were released, the use of Lincoln as a motion picture character became an increasingly rare occurrence. One of the few films to feature Lincoln as its subject was the dreadful 1977 production The Lincoln Conspiracy. The film was based on supposedly authentic, newly discovered documents regarding Lincoln’s assassination, including long-missing pages from John Wilkes Booth’s diary that incriminated Secretary of War Edwin Stanton as the main conspirator in a plot to kidnap Lincoln. Incredibly, the film maintained that Stanton’s plot and Booth’s assassination plot were being carried out on the exact same day at the exact same place, namely Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865! Obviously, Booth’s plot succeeded first, and according to the film Booth was able to escape from the Union forces that were trying to hunt him down, never to be captured. Stanton was then forced to pass off another corpse for Booth’s and to preside over an unfair military trial of Booth’s conspirators in an attempt to forever silence anyone who might reveal the secret of Stanton’s kidnapping plot to the world.

  

The documents that the filmmakers claimed proved this outrageous story were never released to the public, or to any credible authority that could prove or disprove their authenticity—obviously, they never existed in the first place. The Lincoln Conspiracy was made quickly and very cheaply to cash in on all of the unfortunate media attention given to these fraudulent assertions about Lincoln’s murder. Though many historians publicly denounced the film, its much-deserved slide into obscurity probably had more to do with the fact that it was simply unbearable to watch. It would be difficult to find a film as poorly written, badly acted and shabby-looking as is The Lincoln Conspiracy. John Anderson portrayed Lincoln, but whatever merits might have been found in his performance were far outweighed by the film’s deceptive nature and clumsy execution.

 

Though the Lincoln big-screen portrayal began to fall out of favor with mainstream filmmakers beginning in the 1940s, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that television picked up where the movies left off.  Over the years, there have been a number of excellent Lincoln-related screen works produced for television.

 

One of these works was Mr. Lincoln, a series of five half-hour episodes broadcast between November 1952 and February 1953 on Omnibus, a CBS program devoted to showcasing a wide variety of fine arts and documentary productions. The individual episode titles of the series were The End and the Beginning, Nancy Hanks, Growing Up, New Salem, and Ann Rutledge. As the titles imply, the majority of the series dealt with Lincoln’s formative years in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. However, the first program, The End and the Beginning, details Lincoln’s triumphant final days as president, his assassination and the funeral journey to his final resting place in Springfield. After depicting the end of Lincoln’s story, the program cuts to the beginning of his life, its final scenes showing Lincoln being born in his parents’ primitive one-room cabin. The subsequent episodes of Mr. Lincoln tell the story of Lincoln’s struggle to rise above his humble beginnings and to leave behind his life of unrewarding physical labor on the frontier.

 

Royal Dano portrayed Lincoln in all of the episodes except for Nancy Hanks, in which a child actor named Otis Reed, Jr., played the part. Dano gave a remarkable performance as both the young Lincoln and the presidential Lincoln. Physically, Dano was perfect for the part, due to his tall, thin frame, coal-black hair, and deep-set, melancholy eyes. And not only did Dano look like Lincoln, he also acted like him as well—his movements and mannerisms were in keeping with contemporary accounts of what Lincoln was like in life. Dano’s performance benefited greatly from a well-researched script written by the famed author James Agee. Much of it was solidly based on historical fact, and even the material that was speculative in nature seemed to capture the spirit of Lincoln’s personality. This combination of Agee’s excellent script and Dano’s stellar acting performance made Mr. Lincoln one of the most enjoyable and realistic screen portrayals of Lincoln ever produced.

  

Every bit as good was the stunning 1956 program The Day Lincoln Was Shot. The production was based on Jim Bishop’s excellent 1955 novel of the same name that presented a detailed chronicle of Lincoln’s last day of life, and his assassination at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. The Day Lincoln Was Shot was broadcast live on CBS in February 1956 as an episode of Ford Star Jubilee, and starred Raymond Massey as Lincoln, Lillian Gish as Mary Todd Lincoln and Jack Lemmon as John Wilkes Booth. Their stellar performances, combined with the production’s thoughtful adaptation of Bishop’s novel and excellent staging, resulted in The Day Lincoln Was Shot being the most realistic screen dramatization of Lincoln’s murder that will likely ever be created.

  

Even more ambitious than Mr. Lincoln and The Day Lincoln Was Shot was Sandburg’s Lincoln, a series of six hour-long specials sporadically broadcast on NBC from 1974 to 1976. It was based on the famous biographical volumes by Carl Sandburg, and the part of Lincoln was played by Hal Holbrook. The individual episode titles were Prairie Lawyer, Crossing Fox River, Mrs. Lincoln’s Husband, The Unwilling Warrior, Sad Figure Laughing and The Last Days. With the exception of Prairie Lawyer, the episodes dealt with Lincoln’s life from the time of his election to the presidency up to the time of his assassination. While the series tended to paint the historical events it depicted in very broad, general strokes, resulting in a number of inaccurate and misleading scenes, it still did an excellent job of presenting a believable, human Lincoln, a man with personal as well as political concerns.

 

The main reason why Sandburg’s Lincoln was so successful in this regard was because of Holbrook’s outstanding performance. His reputation as a historical actor had been well-established since the mid–1950s, when he first played Mark Twain in the hugely successful one-man show Mark Twain Tonight! Holbrook was 34 years old at the time, and he had to wear extensive makeup to look the part of a 70-year-old Twain. This experience served him well in preparing for the role of Lincoln—he was fitted with false cheekbones, false ears, a false nose, a wig and false beard for the part. And his acting was as good as his makeup—Holbrook realistically presented Lincoln as a rough-edged man of the frontier who talked in a high, squeaky voice, whose common exterior disguised an intellectual and political brilliance that often surprised friends and enemies alike. Though Sandburg’s Lincoln was often lacking in historical fact, the spirit of Holbrook’s portrayal made the series perhaps one of the best recreations of what Lincoln would have been like in life.

 

Unfortunately, most television portrayals over the past two decades have not matched the quality of productions such as Mr. Lincoln or Sandburg’s Lincoln. There have been a number of elaborate television dramatizations of Lincoln’s life produced in recent years, such as the NBC miniseries Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988). The production was based on Vidal’s 1985 novel,and chronicled Lincoln’s life from the time of his inauguration as president in 1861 until his assassination in 1865. The production attempted to present Lincoln stripped of some of the legend and sentiment found in so many screen biographies, but it was marred by a number of historical errors and a somewhat unconvincing portrayal of Lincoln by Sam Waterston.

 

From the 1950s up until the present there have been a number of fine Lincoln documentaries produced either for film or television. Perhaps these works cannot be thought of as Lincoln portrayals in a dramatic sense, but by using actual photos of Lincoln while an offscreen narrator talks about him or reads from his writings, they have told his life story more effectively than the vast majority of live-action Lincoln portrayals. A documentary’s static method of relating Lincoln, or any other history, often does not interest modern audiences—they tend to equate this kind of presentation with the kind of drab lectures that they might have sat through in school. But a documentary is arguably the most accurate way to portray Abraham Lincoln on the screen, because his image and his words are the only direct link that we in the twentieth century have to him.

  

One of the first Lincoln documentaries created specifically for television was the fine 1959 production Meet Mr. Lincoln, which originally aired on NBC. The program, which was produced and directed by Donald B. Hyatt and written by Richard Hanser,attempted to tell Lincoln’s entire life story into its half-hour running time. Unfortunately, Meet Mr. Lincoln’s brevity led to the omission of certain major biographical details that had a profound effect on Lincoln’s life, but it was still a very educational and entertaining program.

 

 In 1990, PBS aired Ken Burns’ nine-part series The Civil War, which consisted of Civil War photographs, battle diagrams, sound effects, interviews with historians and offscreen narration, all skillfully woven together to tell the story of the tragic conflict. The huge success of The Civil War caught the television industry by surprise – the idea that millions of people would be glued to their TV sets watching an 11-hour documentary series with almost no onscreen action ran counter to the industry’s thinking, to say the least. The Civil War accomplished a feat that no other documentary of its kind had done before—it reached a vast number of people that would otherwise never have spent hours of time thinking about the war and its importance in American history. Sam Waterston provided an understated yet effective voice-only portrayal of Lincoln.

 

The success of Burns’ series led to the creation of a number of other similar documentary programs. The most notable of these was the excellent 1992 series Lincoln, which was directed by Peter W. Kunhardt and written by Phillip B. Kunhardt, Jr., and Phillip B. Kunhardt III, descendants of the famed Lincoln scholars-collectors Frederick Hill Meserve and Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt. The series premiered on ABC in late 1992, and with an original running time of roughly three hours, it holds the distinction of being one of the most detailed, accurate and ambitious screen chronicles of Lincoln’s life to date. Lincolnfeatured a fine voice-only portrayal of Lincoln by Jason Robards.

 

 Lincoln’s only real drawback was that it almost seemed like a remake of Burns’ series. Obviously, Lincolncontained much of the same historical information as The Civil War, and since Lincolnwas produced using Burns’ narrative techniques, it came across as being more derivative than groundbreaking. However, the high quality of Lincoln’s research and presentation made up for this weakness many times over. In 1993, Lincolnwas released to the home video market in an expanded four-part version. The individual episode titles of the 1993 version were The Making of a President, The Pivotal Year, I Want to Finish This Job and Now He Belongs to the Ages.

 

My personal hope is that the future holds a combination of both the documentary and the dramatic in terms of Lincoln screen portrayals.  We’ve seen the worlds that computer animators like Pixar Studios can create – as entertaining as their films with living toys and furry monsters have been, wouldn’t it be fabulous to see them apply that technology to re-creating a real-life historical figure like Lincoln?  They could use actual photographs of Lincoln as their source material, and go about setting them to sound and motion. Imagine the possibility of watching Lincoln stand up, walk several steps forward, and start to recite the Gettysburg Address -- not an actor portraying Lincoln, but the image of Lincoln himself.  These dreams of mine aside, one thing is for sure --Abraham Lincoln's image has been on movie and television screens for a century, and there is every reason to believe that Lincoln screen portrayals will be with us for another 100 years as well.  And as new technological breakthroughs occur, his image will hopefully be more realistic and historically accurate than ever before.