Booknotes: Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film

New Arrival:

• Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film: One Hundred Years of Hollywood Mythmaking by Frank J. Wetta & Martin A. Novelli (LSU Press, 2024).

In all the years I've been doing this I've never been offered a review copy of a book that examines depictions of the American Civil War on film and television screens. What makes it more surprising is that Google tells me that there are quite a number of them out there. Among the fairly recent titles are Bruce Chadwick's The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (2001), Brian Steel Wills's Gone with the Glory: The Civil War in Cinema (2011), and a 2017 essay compilation titled The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color. By the way, if you were ever wondering what my favorite Civil War film is, I go back and forth between Pharoah's Army and Ride with the Devil.

Of course, Abraham Lincoln has frequently appeared on celluloid, too, leaving interested parties with fertile ground for analysis of man and myth. The latest is Frank Wetta and Martin Novelli's Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film: One Hundred Years of Hollywood Mythmaking. It "investigates how depictions of women in Hollywood motion pictures helped forge the myth of Lincoln."

From the description: "Exploring female characters’ backstories, the political and cultural climate in which the films appeared, and the contest between the moviemakers’ imaginations and the varieties of historical truth, Wetta and Novelli place the women in Lincoln’s life at the center of the study, including his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln; his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln; his lost loves, Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens; and his wife and widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. Later, while inspecting Lincoln’s legacy, they focus on the 1930s child actor Shirley Temple and the 1950s movie star Marilyn Monroe, who had a well-publicized fascination with the sixteenth president."

More: Wetta and Novelli's approach is "the first to deal extensively with the women in Lincoln’s life, both those who interacted with him personally and those appearing on screen. It is also among the first works to examine how scholarly and popular biography influenced depictions of Lincoln, especially in film."