Highly regarded in its time, Griffith's penultimate film and first
talkie is a prolonged disappointment. It seems that Griffith is
seeking to rewrite his own contribution to cinematic historiography
in The Birth Of A Nation: thus, he restages battle scenes and Lincoln's
assassination, casts his former star Walthall as General Lee's aide,
and so on. But the desire to produce a partially demystified, humanised
portrait of Lincoln is compromised as Griffith's verbal and visual
rhetoric impel him nevertheless to print the legend. Above all,
however, the failure is technical; the director's grasp of sound style
is rudimentary, and the picture emerges as a series of stagey
vignettes.
