Abraham Lincoln (1930)

This biographical film tells Abraham Lincoln's story in a series of episodes: his frontier boyhood, his early love for Ann Rutledge, his work as a country lawyer, his marriage to the ambitious Mary Todd, the debates that carried him to the presidency and the strain of leading a divided nation through the Civil War. Walter Huston gives Lincoln a quiet, homespun dignity, and the film ends with the president's assassination. Abraham Lincoln was the first sound feature by D. W. Griffith, the pioneer behind The Birth of a Nation, and one of his last films; the dialogue was shaped by the poet Stephen Vincent Benét. It was a notable early talkie biopic and helped establish Huston as a leading man in Hollywood.