Abe

Who knows - as everyone is asking - whether Barack Obama will make a great president? What I love already though, is his sense of history and the way he is a conduit to America’s past, from his use of language, which goes back to the founders, to his youthful vitality and invigoration, which reminds us of John F. Kennedy. Most of all there are the links with Abraham Lincoln; a politician from Illinois, powerful speeches, calm in the face of a crisis, the sense of being the ultimate fulfilment of the Emancipation Proclamation. It would take a hardened cynic not to be moved by the use of the 1861 bible at the inauguration or the repeat of Lincoln’s train journey to the capital to be sworn in.

Lincoln is of course one of the truly cinematic presidents. So many moments of his life have passed into the mythology of America; the brief love affair with Ann Rutledge, the intense rivalry with Stephen Douglas, the Gettysburg address, his assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Indeed, he was there almost from the beginning of the movies as D. W. Griffith wrote ‘history with lightning’ in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and then later in Abraham Lincoln (1930). Raymond Massey was nominated for an Oscar for playing the role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). In fact there are numerous examples of him on film (most recently his death was recreated in National Treasure: Book of Secrets). Historians would be right to feel uncomfortable at the awe with which Hollywood has greeted the man and how it has helped make him an American saint, almost beyond criticism. Henry Fonda, who played him in probably the most successful screen incarnation, Young Mr Lincoln (1939), originally declined the part ‘because I didn’t think I could play Lincoln. Lincoln to me was a god.’ Despite these misgivings, Young Mr Lincoln is a piece of poetry, beautiful and moving and one of the best things that John Ford ever did.

Steven Spielberg is looking to make a film about him with Liam Neeson after Tintin. Yet more anticipation!