Sunday, March 1 at 6:00 PM – Gene Siskel Film Center – 164 N State St
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
YOUNG MR. LINCOLN
Directed by John Ford • 1939
Aptly described by Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader as a film that “stirs feelings about the American past that most of us, I suppose, have missed since childhood,” Young Mr. Lincoln is a deft portrait of the future president as a country lawyer and autodidact, winningly embodied by Henry Fonda. It might sound like hagiography, but any state-sanctioned sheen is quickly punctured by backwoods levity and unsentimental business. (Even when Lincoln takes on a legal case to illustrate that justice is a simple matter of right and wrong, he still wants to be paid.) If Lincoln’s greatness could be glimpsed when he was a young man, Ford and screenwriter Lamar Trotti suggest, it’s most evident in these unadorned moments of Abe splitting rails, judging pies, and cheating at tug-of-war. Lauded by Sergei Eisenstein as “daguerreotypes come to life,”Young Mr. Lincoln is a studio pastorale of the highest order. (KW)
100 min • 20th Century-Fox • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society collection at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, permission Disney
“Ford’s mythologizing has seldom seemed stronger or more subtle.”
– David Kehr
“The film radiates a youthful joy, while at the same time insistently implying that the hero’s destiny will necessarily mean the loss of all joy. – Geoffrey O’Brien, Criterion
Preceded by: “Ambition” (Hal Hartley, 1991) – 9 min – New 16mm print from the Chicago Film Society collection
From the Collection: This season at the Gene Siskel Film Center we’ll be highlighting prints from the Chicago Film Society’s collection, which has grown over the past decade to include over 3,000 individual items on 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm, most representing movies that aren’t available on film through distribution companies or other archives. We loan prints from the collection to venues all over the world and all over the country (last year over 5,000 non-Chicagoans attended screenings of our prints in other towns), but this is the first time we’re highlighting our collection in a series right here where we live!
NEXT UP: BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN on Sunday, 3/8 at Music Box