Abraham Lincoln and The Struggle

Griffith sound films historically interesting

WALTER HUSTON is Lincoln in "D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln."

D.W. Griffith invented what we see today as the modern movie.
Before Griffith, movies were short, as little as 10 minutes.
Mostly, film crews would go to busy areas or scenes of festivals or other events and figure out a story line from there.
But Griffith took the Thomas F. Dixon Jr. novel “The Klansman” and turned it into a 3-hour plus movie, complete with the first close-up (that of Lillian Gish), sprawling Civil War battle scenes and other epic events. A tremendous enterprise for 1915.
People literally fainted from the excitement of the film and movie history was made.
Griffith was born in 1875, a decade after the Civil War ended. A southerner, he listened to his father and uncles talk about fighting.
“Birth of a Nation” was controversial in the way it depicted African-Americans, even then and the way the Ku Klux Klan “rescued” the white women from the clutches of black people, who were actually whites in blackface, since blacks could not play major roles in movies.
By 1930, Griffith made two sound movies, one of which took him back to his Civil War roots, “Abraham Lincoln,” also known as “D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln.” The opening credits tell us it was “personally directed” by Griffith.
Walter Huston played Lincoln in this stagey picture. We see what appears to be vignettes of the man throughout his life, from his birth to his early days to becoming a lawyer and finally making it to the White House.
While hailed at the time, Huston portrays the 16th president as more of a country bumpkin who talks in folksy analogies that aren’t particularly witty.
As a young man, he falls for Ann Rutledge, played by Una Merkel.
Ann unfortunately dies, with Abe at her side, as the movie tells us. He must settle for zany Mary Todd Lincoln.
This is not a riveting look at Lincoln and blame it on early sound or my hearing, but I couldn’t always understand what was going on with the southern-drawl characters.
The most suspenseful part involved Lincoln’s assassination, which is meticulously done. But the DVD compares this assassination portrayal with the one Griffith did 15 years earlier in “Birth of a Nation.” Frankly, I thought the earlier, silent version was more realistic and better executed.
Besides the film on “Lincoln,” the same DVD has another film, “The Struggle.”
Griffith was 56 when he made this film and lived another 17 years, but this was his last movie. It bombed.
But “The Struggle” isn’t bad, better than the Lincoln film.
Hal Skelly plays Jimmie Wilson, a man in love who gets drunk and vows to his wife-to-be that he will never drink again. For a long time, he doesn’t.
But eventually he is prodded to imbibe. His wife and young daughter wonder where Daddy is. When he comes home, his daughter, played by Edna Hagan, says he looks sick and his breath smells funny. Hagan, by the way, is still alive, according to the Internet Movie Data Base.
Daddy keeps drinking, makes a fool of himself at an engagement party for his sister-in-law and pretty much ruins the family.
Eventually, they are kicked out of their apartment, with all of their belongings out on the sidewalk.
These are early talkies but Griffith brings a realism to them. For instance, as in real life, people talk over each other, interrupt each other. Before this, in early sound movies, the rule was to make sure the other actor was finished with what he was saying before you said your part.
“The Struggle” was panned as old-fashioned and seeing a movie about misery certainly wasn’t something people were jumping for during the Great Depression.
It was pulled from theaters in many instances in less than a week.
Griffith worked on other people’s films on and off until his death in 1948.
“Abraham Lincoln” and “The Struggle” aren’t compelling cinema but historically interesting. These were the father of modern cinema’s only sound movies and they are conveniently on one DVD.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
• Directed by D.W. Griffith
• Written by John W. Considine Jr., adapted by Stephen Vincent Benet
• Runtime: 96 minutes
• Not rated, OK for all audiences but kids will be bored
• 2 stars out of 4

THE STRUGGLE
• Directed by D.W. Griffith
• Written by John Emerson and Anita Loos
• Runtime: 87 minutes
• Not rated, intense for some children
• 2 1/2 stars out of 4