Mark S. Reinhart, Abraham Lincoln on Screen: A Filmography of Dramas and
Documentaries Including Television, 1903-1998 (Jefferson, NC, and London:
McFarland & Co., 1999, £37.50) Pp. 292. ISBN 0 7864 0602 X.
The first know screen representation of Abraham Lincoln appeared in 1903 and he
continued an extremely popular subject until the 1940s. Viewed with great reverence,
most interpretations saw him as a compassionate man guiding the country through the
trouble times of the Civil War. The Lincoln cult reached its climax with the release of
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) – which permanently
fixed the parameters of the screen Lincoln. In the post-war years, the decline Abe
suffered in cinematic representation has been, at least partially, compensated by a
varied diet of popular TV dramas and documentaries. Recently, Lincoln has been
subjected to rather gentle satire. For example, an episode of the The Simpsons, entitled
Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington is both a perceptive commentary on the Lincoln cult
and a knowing reference to Capra‟s classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Mark Reinhart has lovingly and meticulously assembled production details,
cast and commentaries on over two hundred dramas and documentaries of Abraham
Lincoln on large and small screens. Many titles come from the early silent era where
information needed painstaking reassembly. Reinhart points out that historians have
shied away from using film as a source. He rightly criticises Merrill Peterson‟s recent
treatment, Abraham Lincoln in American Memory (1994), for its failure to give
adequate space to screen interpretations. While the point is well taken, nevertheless,
he fails to acknowledge the substantial methodological progress made by historians
outside of Lincoln studies. One only has to think of the work of Francis Couvares on
censorship, Steven Ross on the working class and Edward Countryman on westerns to
appreciate the strides taken by the discipline. The innovative approaches they, and
others, adopt find no place in Abraham Lincoln on Screen.
Reinhart benchmarks films against a never fully elaborated „historically
accurate‟ view of Lincoln and his life. While this approach -- by bringing to bear what
we know about the man up against filmic speculation -- has the advantage of deflating
the more preposterous flights of fancy, it does neglect the equally serious intellectual
challenge which is to explore the ideological and cultural relationship between drama
and society. „Accuracy‟ is never the judge of fiction. The author only half glimpses
the alternative approach. Nevertheless, Mark Reinhart does film studies a tremendous
service by assembling this material. This book will be a launch pad, or the bricks and
mortar, for historical treatments of the screen Lincoln. Historians, who still have
much further to go in their use of film, would do well to take the advice of the Abe
appearing in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), “Party on, dudes.”
University of Greenwich ANDREW DAWSON