Abe Lincoln In Illinois (RKO) falters through the Great Emancipator's frontier youth, does not hit its solemn stride until long-legged, melancholy Lawyer Lincoln stalks in to meet tightlipped, go-getting Mary Todd. From then on, it is dedicated to the proposition that its doom-ridden hero was nagged into greatness by an ambitious wife.
Main problem of this picture, which Robert Sherwood scripted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, is the same as the play's: how to create a tragic mood when almost nothing tragic happens. As in the play, Scripter Sherwood tries to turn the trick with a series of biographical episodes, Lincoln's easygoing frontier life, the death of Ann Rutledge, his unhappy marriage, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, his election. As in the play, Actor Raymond Massey turns the trick for him. But there are also shrewd playwrighting touches: reluctant Mr. Lincoln symbolically taken in charge by the soldiers as soon as he wins his election ; Lincoln listening to his fellow townsmen sing John Brown's Body as the Presidential train heads him toward Washington, war, assassination.
Why Lincoln married Mary Todd is as hard to discover from the picture as from history, and veteran Actress Ruth Gordon (in her first picture) does not do much to clarify it. But Canadian-born Raymond Massey's ill-kempt, loose-lipped, moody Lincoln is as good on the screen as on the stage, and the picture's best excuse for being.
An old lady in Eugene, Ore., where much of the film was shot, does not agree. Because black-bearded Abraham Lincoln once dandled her as a child on his knee, she was introduced to clean-shaven Actor Massey, but she angrily refused to sit on Massey's knee for RKO's publicity department. Reason: a clean-shaven Lincoln is a monstrosity. "Why don't you let him play the part?" she shrilled, pointing to a black-bearded extra. "He could do it better than the man you have."
The Blue Bird (20th Century-Fox). Votaries of mystic Belgian Playwright Maurice Maeterlinck may be puzzled to find a wild-west forest fire blazing in the middle of this much publicized screen version of his fantasy, The Blue Bird. They have other surprises in store for them:
>Mytyl, the little sister in Maeterlinck's play, has become the picture's leading character to provide a part for Shirley Temple.
>Mytyl's father, a poor woodcutter in the play, has become a Tyrolese patriot about to join Andreas Hofer against Napoleon Bonaparte.
>The characters of Milk, Fire, Bread, Sugar have disappeared.
>Scraps of the Land of Memory and the Kingdom of the Future survive, somewhat transformed by Darryl F. Zanuck's magic wand.
Hollywood-hardened children, who like their fantasy lavish and solid, may enjoy the elaborate Technicolored sets (cost: $200,000). They may even take in their stride the skulls, owls, ravens, blazing lightning, flaming forest and crashing trees the producers have got together to scare the daylights out of them. They can scarcely fail to enjoy Shirley Temple's artful childishness or chubby, kinky-haired Johnny Russell as her little brother, Tyltyl.