Lincoln
Lincoln
| 27 March 1988 (USA)
SEASON & EPISODES
  • 1
  • Reviews
    Invaderbank

    The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

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    Nayan Gough

    A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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    Allison Davies

    The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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    Raymond Sierra

    The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

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    denis888

    This is a nice piece of work, but far from being ideal. It was clear the filmmakers had little funds so that they used the re-enactors to show the battle scenes, and the color scheme in those differs a lot. But that is OK. The film itself is a bit too long and bit too unrealistic. Gore Vidal was a writer and he did bring a lot of fiction onto real events. But despite all this, Watterson and Tyler did their main parts well and that counts as a big plus. In general, not bad, but still, much weaker than many other Civil War films of the era. The movie pays a decent tribute to the life and sufferings of a real great man, but it often tends to drag along or slow down painfully quite too often. Recommended but with some caution

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    bkoganbing

    Sam Waterson and Mary Tyler Moore play Abraham and Mary Lincoln, 16th president of the United States and his first lady. A rather calculating politician from the mid west who invented a cracker-barrel image of himself that has passed into legend.When John Ford and Henry Fonda made their Young Mr. Lincoln back in 1939, Ford allegedly told Fonda that he was not playing the Great Emancipator, but a hick country lawyer from New Salem. Waterson took some of that same advice in his performance. Lincoln shows just how much image management he used in making a bumpkin persona belie an incredible innate shrewdness. This was a man with so much confidence in his abilities to deal with people that he took in his two chief rivals William Seward and Salmon Chase in his cabinet as Secretaries of State and Treasury and worked with both.Mary Tyler Moore gives one of her most memorable portrayals on the big and small screen as Mary Lincoln who was one woman with issues. She caused her patient husband no end of grief with her extravagance in the middle of the Civil War over her wardrobe and redecorating the White House. It all of course hid some incipient madness, lot of that brought on by the death of her son Willie.Some meticulous research was done for this series as the personalities of Civil War Washington seem to have descended on the cast playing them. I particularly liked what James Gammon did with General Ulysses S. Grant a man who had two main characteristics, military genius and an occasional bad judgment in friends.Lincoln's legend like JFK passed into our American scene with his assassination at the moment of his triumph holding the Union together. Forgetting the course the country would have taken had he lived and retired at the end of his second term in 1869, how would he be regarded today, as quite the mythic figure he is?This mini-series should be well regarded and seen.

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    lerrorm

    Thanks for the posted views on this excellent movie-made-for-television.It's significant to note that the work is historically accurate in addition to being entertaining. The script, a little heavy at times, fills in a lot of background and detail. Other devices are more subtle. For example, Mary was fluent in French. In the movie, as their carriage approaches Ford's Theatre, Mary says she would like to visit Paris and then she slips into a single line of French. Similarly, Lincoln is seen lingering in the telegraph office. The Union maintained extensive telegraph networks, one of their secret and major advantages over Southern strategists.The producers probably saved money by using video footage of reenactors at actual locations such as Antietam.

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    VerhoHo

    Though the performances are fine, it is my opinion that anyone who enjoyed this ridiculous simplification could not possibly have read Gore Vidal's book. The tone of Vidal's book is totally absent from this poorly shot and poorly written waste. I am amazed that Vidal allowed his name to be associated with it. Vidal's book is vibrant. It seems like the director did everything he could to deaden it. There are so many ridiculous scenes that have been updated to include modern mores that I would be surprised if the screenwriter did anything but read the book once and then rely on his grade school memories. The film is so badly shot that you almost never understand what is going on, because all important conversations take place in long shot and close-ups seem to be used at random. Every single battle sequence looks identical and uninteresting. READ THE BOOK! You are guaranteed a far more satisfying experience. It is the best book ever written on Lincoln and it is NOTHING like this film.

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