Abraham Lincoln

A battlefield in fog, or Walter Huston alone in the telegraph office, and for a minute the man who made Birth of a Nation is visible again. The rest is Lincoln from the New Salem store to Ford's Theatre in a chain of episodes, Ann Rutledge dying, the Douglas debates, the war rooms, Booth, with dialogue that is stiff and staging that sits still for the microphone. Griffith's first talking picture, from a script Stephen Vincent Benét worked on and the studio cut down; he made one more film after it. Una Merkel is Ann Rutledge. It belongs in the catalogue for him, not for Lincoln. United Artists, 1930.