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Abraham Lincoln

From a Kentucky cabin to Ford’s Theatre, D.W. Griffith’s first talking picture tries to give America its martyr whole. Made in 1930 for United Artists after the silent colossus of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance — and after a decade of dwindling power — it is Griffith’s late patriotic bid: the man who had already put Lincoln on screen as a saint of union now builds an entire talkie around him. Walter Huston is the rail-splitter, lawyer, and wartime president; Una Merkel is Ann Rutledge; Stephen Vincent Benét helped write the speeches. Karl Struss photographs the myth. Awkward with microphones but sincere in its civics, it stands with Griffith’s other hymns to national memory — a sound-era coda from the director who taught movies how to think in epochs. His last film but one (The Struggle, 1931).

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