Every movie from the thirties is dated, but if you were to watch only John Ford movies it would seem more dated than if you watched others. i.e. Grand Hotel is comparatively modern melodrama. With Ford, there's always the hard-sell of someone's nobility (Abe, The Joads). Always the over-emphasis of some heavy's badness. Always the poorly crafted, awkward and obvious scripts. This is no exception. It's just a rather belabored device to deliver sentiment. And sentiment is all this has going for it.<br /><br />What Ford does here doesn't make me appreciative of Lincoln, it just makes me wonder how the States were ever settled by the population of complete morons depicted here. Ford went on to make decent movies. This is too dated to be anything but bad. It feels entirely false. <br /><br />Henry Fonda with a fake nose is bizarre. And no one from Illinois would pronounce the trailing 'S,' or say "Shonuff!"