from Peter Stowell, John Ford (Twayne, 1986)

Young Mr. Lincoln, to a great extent, is a celebration of the loss of innocence. This young Lincoln is both the American Adam and the American democrat. But the film is not a tale of Eden because Ford showed that only through the tragedy of the loss of innocence could Lincoln and America mature. Ford made sure that -the film's one scene with Ann was clearly Edenic so that it becomes the index by which we measure the future's loss and progress. All the signifiers of this scene indicated a movement back in time. Classical Hollywood film coding (for which Ford was significantly responsible) used left-to-right movement, particularly at a diagonal toward the background of the frame, to indicate progression into the future, whereas the reverse, right-to-left movement, described a return to the past. During their Edenic scene together Ann and Abe walked along the river from right to left (the past); after Ann dies, Lincoln repeats this journey, and when he goes out onto the balcony with Mary Todd to give Ann one last thought, he looks out toward the left at the river. On his way to Mrs. Clay's (his surrogate mother) cabin he and his Sancho Panza, Efe Turner (Eddie Collins), return along the river in the same right-to-left direction. These are all metaphorical journeys into his Edenic past. On the other hand, when he rides his mule into Springfield, sits back-lit in the courtroom, or follows the road to the stormy top of the hill at the film's end, he is shown in left-to-right (the future) positions or movements following his Lincolnesque destiny. Finally, there are the eternal "Lincoln Memorial" poses. These are expressed by frontal shots freezing him in time. This film, then, has a carefully structured mythic choreography: movement right to left back toward an Edenic past; movement left to right toward a Lincolnesque destiny; and static, frontal one-shots memorializing the legendary public images. (38)