Young Mr. Lincoln / Prisoner of Shark Island

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, 1939, 20th Century Fox, 100 min. Director John Ford. The emphasis is on the simple joys and hardships that shaped the president-to-be’s youthful years, events that molded a shy, country lawyer into one of the most distinguished of American leaders. We follow Lincoln as he clerks in a general store, studies law from second-hand books and endures heartbreak as his first love dies a premature death.

PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, 1936, 20th Century Fox, 96 min. On the dark and stormy night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter) set the broken leg of a man passing through his rural Maryland neighborhood. Unbeknownst to Mudd, his patient was the assassin, John Wilkes Booth. After Booth’s capture, innocent Dr. Mudd was tried and convicted with seven others as co-conspirators. Three went to the gallows, and the other five – Mudd amongst them – were sentenced to life in the Shark Island prison colony in the Gulf of Mexico.