The nation’s divisions were even more profound, of course, when the victorious Republican candidate, President-elect Abraham Lincoln, was preparing to take office in 1861. Anthony Mann’s historical film noir “The Tall Target,” which I discuss in this clip, dramatizes those divisions efficiently and emotionally, distilling the coming furies of the Civil War into a single tense train trip in which a New York police detective, played by Dick Powell, attempts to thwart a plot on Lincoln’s life. Mann is both a master stylist and a poet of anger; he extracts from the affair not just a sense of righteousness but also one of indignation, which plays a major role in the 1951 movie’s contemporaneous resonance with the ongoing quest of blacks for equality. It is very much a story of the fight for civil rights, and it depicts that fight as no mere rhetorical plea but a physical struggle in which physical defiance is indispensable and physical danger is inevitable. In the guise of a stirring tale of bygone conflicts, Mann’s film looks audaciously ahead with moral urgency to those that were rising.
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