A Few Words About A few words about...™Young Mr. Lincoln -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Matt Hough]

Mine arrived today.

As did mine. And I got that same e-mail for The Hanging Tree.

 

[Alberto_D]

I need to watch this film. I only saw some point near end, when he interrogates a witness in court and made hin confess the crime.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Top of my list for the next B&N Criterion sale, for sure.

I read a study somewhere investigating the effective resolution of 35mm film at various points from original camera negative to release prints. For the release prints, I believe they looked at prints of the same footage in Orlando, LA, NYC, Montreal, Paris and Milan. IIRC, the print at the highest performing theater had a horizontal resolution of 875 line pairs (approximately 1750x945). While that's not 2K or even 1080p, it's still well above 480i and benefits from the resolution and bitrate of Blu-Ray. We'll probably never see a UHD 4k release of Young Mr. Lincoln, but that's okay.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I bought this thinking it was a movie I had previously seen as a child (my 4th grade teacher loved to show us movies from this period about historical figures, and I definitely remember seeing Young Thomas Edison and Edison, The Man among others), but in looking over the Blu-ray package that just arrived, I may not have actually seen this. Which is a welcome surprise, anytime you can get a John Ford-Henry Fonda collaboration that plays as a brand new experience is something worth savoring.

At the very least, I figure this disc will be representative of what an original print looked like back in the day, if not what the original negative was like. Since the filmmakers then knew what was on the print is what counted (and even were able to hide things by taking advantage of the generational loss from negative to prints), then I don't think I'll have any issues with how the disc looks. I'm always up for a gorgeous 35mm print!

 

[Alberto_D]

Screengrabs : http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Young-Mr-Lincoln-Blu-ray/191182/#Screenshots

Criterion did a very good job, considering they had a print to work with. If the print was a year or two younger, when finer grain print stocks was intorduced...

But if this was a original print and had the righ photography wished by the director, I ask myself if the tendency of this and many HD transfer, to pull a bit from shadows, trying to recover details hidden there, is unquestionable the right decision.

Despite the Criterion informs a lot about the restoration sources... :

"This new digital restoration was undertaken by Twentieth Century Fox and the Criterion Collection, primarily from a 4K scan of an original 35mm nitrate print. In addition, a safety 35mm fine-grain was used for sections of the film where the print was damaged or missing footage. The nitrate print, held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was scanned on an Oxberry wet-gate film scanner at Cineric in New York. The fine-grain was scanned on a Lasergraphics film scanner at Roundabout in Burbank, California. The original monaural soundtrack was mastered at 24-bit from the 35mm magnetic tracks. Clicks, thumps, hiss, hum, and crackle were manually removed using Pro Tools HD and iZotope RX."

Despite that, Criterion Forum (fans made forum) keeps the habit of call everything from film elements as negatives. No matter if it's a positive, they call negative.

http://www.criterionforum.org/DVD-review/young-mr-lincoln-blu-ray/the-criterion-collection/1918

" The restoration was primarily sourced from a new scan of the 35mm nitrate negatives, with a 35mm safety fine-grain to fill in any missing scenes or sequences too badly damaged on the negative. The notes state this restoration was undertaken by both 20th Century Fox and Criterion."

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Picked up a copy of this one at my local Barnes & Noble last week as part of the current Criterion 50 percent off sale. Watched it tonight in celebration of the Fourth of July, since I don't think I'm going to have the time to revisit 1776 this year. The fact that the bulk of the movie takes place on the Fourth of July and the days immediately following it were just a bonus.

This reminded me of last year's Darkest Hour, in that the whole film is built as a showcase of its central performance. All of the supporting characters feel dated, but when Henry Fonda's on screen at young Lincoln, it's pure magic. Like Daniel Day-Lewis, he subverts our expectations for a grand historical titan. His Lincoln is folksy, wily, and occasionally vulgar.

When you figure that Triumph of the Will came out four years earlier, and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky the year before, this feels like John Ford's democratic, individualistic answer.

 

[Johnny Angell]

How historically accurate is this movie? My memory of it is that Fonda’s Lincoln was almost wearing wings, he was to pure.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

How historically accurate is this movie?

Not very. The big reveal of the court case was taken from a real case won by Lincoln as a practicing lawyer, but the rest of the participants in the case are fictional. This is more like like the folk story version of Lincoln's early professional life than a historical recounting striving for accuracy.

My memory of it is that Fonda’s Lincoln was almost wearing wings, he was to pure.

The movie reveres him, but it doesn't scrub him down and put him in shrink wrap.