Perhaps America’s most screen-adapted president, Abraham Lincoln is the mythic epicenter of this John Ford double feature. The first collaboration between Ford and Henry Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln molds the director’s Whitmanesque ardor for the assassinated into an enthralling, but decidedly fictionalized early history. The cornpone script, which follows Lincoln from a general- store clerkship to his adept defense of two wrongfully accused brothers, is at times anxiously earnest, but Ford’s reflection on his Lincoln’s maturation retains a poignancy nonetheless. Prisoner of Shark Island, meanwhile, attempts to exonerate the historical Dr. Samuel Mudd, the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Samaritan who unwittingly treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg.
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