Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, film editor and film theorist. He was a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible. In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine Sight & Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 11th-greatest film of all time.
Henry Jaynes Fonda was an American actor whose career spanned five decades on Broadway and in Hollywood. On screen and stage, he often portrayed characters that embodied an everyman image.
Abe Lincoln in Illinois is a 1940 biographical-drama film that depicts the life of Abraham Lincoln from his departure from Kentucky until his election as president of the United States. In the UK, the film is known by the alternate title Spirit of the People. The film was adapted by Grover Jones and Robert E. Sherwood from Sherwood's 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name. It was directed by John Cromwell.
John Martin Feeney, known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director and producer. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers during the Golden Age of Hollywood, and was one of the first American directors to be recognized as an auteur. In a career of more than 50 years, he directed over 140 films between 1917 and 1965, and received six Academy Awards including a record four wins for Best Director for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952).
Ward Hill Lamon was a personal friend and self-appointed bodyguard of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Lamon was famously absent the night Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, having been sent by Lincoln to Richmond, Virginia.
Abraham Lincoln, also released under the title D. W. Griffith's "Abraham Lincoln", is a 1930 pre-Code American biographical film about Abraham Lincoln directed by D. W. Griffith. It stars Walter Huston as Lincoln and Una Merkel, in her second speaking role, as Ann Rutledge. The script was co-written by Stephen Vincent Benét, author of the Civil War prose poem John Brown's Body (1928), and Gerrit Lloyd. This was the first of only two sound films made by Griffith.
Ann Mayes Rutledge was allegedly Abraham Lincoln's first love.
Abe Lincoln in Illinois is a play written by the American playwright Robert E. Sherwood in 1938, based principally on the 1926 biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years by Carl Sandburg. The play, in three acts, covers the life of President Abraham Lincoln from his childhood through his final speech in Illinois before he left for Washington. The play also covers his romance with Mary Todd and his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, and uses Lincoln's own words in some scenes. Sherwood received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1939 for his work.
This is the filmography of American actor Henry Fonda. From the beginning of Fonda's career in 1935 through to his last projects in 1981, Fonda appeared in more than 100 films, television programs and short subjects.
Jesse James is a 1939 American Western film directed by Henry King and starring Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Nancy Kelly and Randolph Scott. Written by Nunnally Johnson, the film is loosely based on the life of Jesse James, the outlaw from whom the film derives its name. The supporting cast includes Henry Hull, John Carradine, Brian Donlevy, Jane Darwell and Lon Chaney, Jr.
Charles Brown Middleton was an American stage and film actor. During a film career that began at age 46 and lasted almost 30 years, he appeared in nearly 200 films as well as numerous plays. Sometimes credited as Charles B. Middleton, he is perhaps best remembered for his role as the villainous emperor Ming the Merciless in the three Flash Gordon serials made between 1936 and 1940.
William "Duff" Armstrong was an American Union Army soldier and the defendant in an 1858 murder prosecution in which he was defended by Abraham Lincoln, four years before he was elected President of the United States. The case would later be portrayed in the 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin on the Sinking Spring farm, south of Hodgenville in Hardin County, Kentucky. His siblings were Sarah Lincoln Grigsby and Thomas Lincoln, Jr. After a land title dispute forced the family to leave in 1811, they relocated to Knob Creek farm, eight miles to the north. By 1814, Thomas Lincoln, Abraham's father, had lost most of his land in Kentucky in legal disputes over land titles. In 1816, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, their nine-year-old daughter Sarah, and seven-year-old Abraham moved to what became Indiana, where they settled in Hurricane Township, Perry County, Indiana.
The Grapes of Wrath is a 1940 American drama film directed by John Ford. It was based on John Steinbeck's 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and the executive producer was Darryl F. Zanuck.
Sergeant Rutledge is a 1960 American Technicolor Western film directed by John Ford and starring Jeffrey Hunter, Constance Towers, Woody Strode and Billie Burke. The title was also used for the novelization published in the same year. Six decades later, the film continues to attract attention because it was one of the first mainstream films in the U.S. to treat racism frankly and to give a starring role to an African-American actor. In 2017, film critic Richard Brody observed that "The greatest American political filmmaker, John Ford, relentlessly dramatized, in his Westerns, the mental and historical distortions arising from the country’s violent origins—including its legacy of racism, which he confronted throughout his career, nowhere more radically than in Sergeant Rutledge."
Elliott Nugent was an American actor, playwright, writer, and film director.
Trial films is a subgenre of the legal/courtroom drama that encompasses films that are centered on a civil or criminal trial, typically a trial by jury.
Frank Stanley Nugent was an American screenwriter, journalist, and film reviewer. He wrote 21 film scripts, 11 for director John Ford. He wrote almost a thousand reviews for The New York Times before leaving journalism for Hollywood. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953 and twice won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Comedy. The Writers Guild of America, West ranks his screenplay for The Searchers (1956) among the top 101 screenplays of all time.
Bert Lawrence Glennon was an American cinematographer and film director. He directed Syncopation (1929), the first film released by RKO Radio Pictures.
Pyotr Andreyevich Pavlenko, was a Soviet writer, screenwriter and war correspondent. Recipient of four Stalin Prizes.
