6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Focusing on the president's great achievements and personal tragedies, D.W. Griffith's biopic of Abraham Lincoln depicts the American icon with sensitivity and grace.
Starring: Walter Huston, Una Merkel, William L. Thorne, Kay Hammond (II), Lucille La VerneDrama | 100% |
History | 27% |
Biography | 14% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.16:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.2:1
English: LPCM 2.0
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
With Steven Spielberg's Lincoln in theaters and all this absurd post-election claptrap about secession, now seems an appropriate time for Kino
Classics to release D.W. Griffith's 1930 talkie, Abraham Lincoln, the earliest major biopic of the lanky, bearded emancipator. Griffith had briefly
treated the president's assassination in his influential and divisive 1915 antebellum epic, The Birth of a Nation—a monumental advance in
filmmaking marred by its outright racism—and fifteen years later he would return for a more comprehensive look at Honest Abe, using a script co-
written by Stephen Vincent Benét, the then-recent recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his book-length American narrative poem, John Brown's
Body.
Honorific to the extent of being worshipful—perhaps in Griffith's ongoing effort to distance himself from Birth of a Nation's outdated attitudes—
the film also seems somewhat wooden and perfunctory now, partially because it blazes through the entirety of Lincoln's life, sacrificing depth for
breadth. Future filmmakers would learn it's easier and more effective to deal with Lincoln's biography in chunks. John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939) and John Cromwell's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) both deal with the pre-presidential years, while Spielberg's new film confines itself to
Lincoln's final months. Griffith, however, takes us all the way from birth to death in what amounts to a series of historical vignettes.
Abraham Lincoln strides lankily onto Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer sourced from a recent 35mm restoration by the Museum of Modern Art. Unlike many public domain editions, this version is very nearly complete—containing 93 minutes of a 97 minute original runtime— and for its age, the print is in good-to-great condition. There are the usual concerns—specks and small scratches, slight brightness fluctuations—but no major stains, tearing, or warpage. Like most Kino Classics titles, the film is essentially presented "as is," with no significant digital clean up. However, this also means there's no heavy, smeary noise reduction or halo-causing edge enhancement. It's a very pure look, with a natural, visible grain structure, and I didn't spot any overt signs of compression. Of course, simply by merit of being transferred in high definition, the film looks drastically better than previous versions, with tighter textures, stronger detail, and an all-around sense of I'm looking at a film print, not a sized-down digital facsimile refinement. The film's monochromatic gradient is handled well too; blacks are sufficiently deep without endangering shadow detail, and whites are crisp without being overblown. A pleasure to watch in motion.
The film has been given an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 track that does what it can with the existing audio elements. A disclaimer before the film begins warns, "Portions of the soundtrack of the first three reels have not survived. During these sequences, dialogue and music cues are provided by subtitles." And yes, for the first twenty minutes or so of the film, there's a patchy mixture of normal sound and dead silence. Unfortunately, barring the discovery of some new print with the audio wholly intact, this is simply the state of affairs. That said, Kino's English subtitles for these sections are quite complete, although—it should be noted—there are no subtitle options whatsoever for the rest of the film. Once we get past the third reel, the sound mix is complete, but not without issues. Crackle and hiss are present to varying degrees most of the time and don't seem to have been digitally attenuated at all. Not unexpectedly, the track can also feel thin and brittle at times, with slight peaking in the high end. If you watch a lot of older films, you're probably used to this, though, and none of the problems rise to the level of a persistent distraction. Dialogue, most importantly, is always easy to understand.
The only bonus features on the disc are two short staged interviews between Griffith and Huston that were filmed during the making of Abraham Lincoln and intended to be shown in conjunction with the 1930 re-release of Birth of a Nation. The director fields questions from his leading man, mostly discussing what he remembers from the South of his childhood. In high definition, running 5:57 and 1:53.
Four score and two years ago, D.W. Griffith brought forth to audiences a new film, conceived in Hollywood, and dedicated to the proposition that Abraham Lincoln was a damn fine president. That film, 1930's Abraham Lincoln, seems fusty and too straightforward now—it was old-fashioned even in its own day—but it features a charming, occasionally moving performance by Walter Huston in the title role, and it has some historical value as the pioneering Griffith's penultimate film. With a new 35mm restoration by the Museum of Modern Art, Kino Classics has brought the movie to Blu-ray in far better shape than it has ever looked on home video. If you're a fan of early cinema, a Griffith apologist, or a Lincoln/Civil War buff, it's probably worth checking out—just don't expect a masterpiece.
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