Time has proven Young Mr. Lincoln one of John Ford's finest works. Ford takes the legend of the youthful Lincoln—his rustic humor, his love for Ann Rutledge, his craftiness as a lawyer—and weaves it into a simple elegaic tapestry, alive with nuance. It is a magical film, deriving its strength and charm from what Sergei Eisenstein described as its "stylized daguerrotype manner that is in unison with the moral character of Lincoln's sentences" and from its genesis in a "womb of national and popular spirit." As Ford, in 1939, began to immerse himself in the landscape of the American past, he became preoccupied with the tortures and consolations of memory. The vague melancholia which plays around the edges of the luminous images of Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk reflects a Sisyphean desire to push past an unbreachable boundary—the boundary of time.

The...