“Hello viewers and welcome! Yes, that’s right! It’s time again for The Howard S. Berger Total Emotional Breakdown Hour! It’s America’s favorite wacky new program where our lovably clueless “film historian” (blech) completely loses his shit yet again on another utterly wasted DVD commentary track! Hahahaha! So let’s sit back for the next 90 minutes and enjoy the incoherent ravings of our favorite DVD commentary mod!”
By Paul Mavis
I wanted to open this review with the rather startling announcement that a beloved but frustratingly obscure (at least in terms of home media presence) Sunn Classic Pictures title, 1977’s The Lincoln Conspiracy, starring a top-flight cast including Bradford Dillman, John Dehner, Whit Bissell, John Anderson, Robert Middleton, Len Wayland, James Green, and of course, narrator Brad Crandal (with TV’s Cooter, Cliff Barnes, and Gopher along for the ride), had been released…on the Blu-ray format, no less. Such a seismic occurrence (on the same plane, I humbly assert, with the breaking open of the Seven Seals) should have been the inspiration for paragraphs and paragraphs of hosannas from me about Sunn and the possibilities for definitive, high-def releases of other cherished titles from that production/releasing company, including When the Wind Blows, The Outer Space Connection, The Adventures of Frontier Freemont, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, The Mysterious Monsters, In Search of Noah’s Ark, Beyond and Back, The Bermuda Triangle, In Search of Historic Jesus, The President Must Die, and Beyond Death’s Door (I really thought Hangar 18‘s earlier Blu release would have started the ball rolling…).
Click to order The Lincoln Conspiracy on Blu-ray:
(Paid link. As an Amazon Associate, the website owner earns from qualifying purchases.)
Unfortunately, considering the now (sadly) confirmed memories I had of seeing The Lincoln Conspiracy at its opening matinee in my town (in a nutshell: bigger stars and mainstream dramatic storytelling=less “Sunn Funn”), the absolutely maddening commentary track featuring one of our favorites here at Movies & Drinks, “Film Historian” Howard S. Berger, slobbering over and drowning out ground zero Sunn participant, director James L. Conway, frankly made more of an impression on me, thus the unconventional opening. I’m afraid recommending this release of the workable but uninspiring The Lincoln Conspiracy is as problematic as urging the Great Emancipator to give a standing ovation at the finale of Our American Cousin.
The setting? The American Civil War (no, not the coming one when fraudulent votes are suddenly found again in the middle of the night to re-select President Bumbles—I mean the previous one, in the 1860s). President Abraham Lincoln (John Anderson), fairly certain he’s about to be victorious in The War Between the States, has a bigger problem than “war” on his hands: “peace.” He is told the North cries for vengeance and retribution, but he knows reconciliation and even aid to the vanquished South is necessary to preserve the Union.
Unfortunately, this would be bad for business for certain Northern politicians who want permanent control of Congress. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Robert Middleton) and Chief of the National Detective Police Department Col. Lafayette C. Baker (John Dehner) have committed themselves to a conspiracy to have the President kidnapped, and stolen away for a few weeks. The hope is this will influence the coming elections against the South, and keep the Northern Senators and congressmen in charge of the country…while also keeping secret their treasonous acts, such as the selling of official passwords for military post roads in the aid of smuggling and blockade running. This conspiracy is backed up by no less than weaselly Sen. John Conness (Whit Bissell), one of Lincoln’s most trusted allies.
Too bad these traitors picked as their operational man the vain, sweaty, perpetual foul-up John Wilkes Booth (Bradford Dillman), the famous Southern actor who postures beautifully…but who can’t seem to put one foot in front of the other when it comes to criminal activity. Booth and his merry band of screw-ups have botched numerous attempts to snatch ol’ Abe, and cool customer Baker has had enough. Recruiting a former Confederate spy, Capt. James William Boyd (James Green), from a Union prison, Baker wants Boyd to take over the plot to hijack the Prez. There’s only one hitch: Booth blows his cool and decides the only way to save the South and regain his reputation…is to call an audible and kill Abraham Lincoln.
RELATED | More 1970s film reviews
Sounds pretty good, right? How do you screw up that story? Well…you start by hiring Sunn Classic Pictures. Okay, sure—it’s a cheap shot (our specialty). However, if you’ve randomly read just a handful of my thousands of reviews, you’re more than likely to see a laudatory reference to Sunn. I was obsessed with them when I was a kid, but I’m not going to go over that same ground again here. Suffice it to say: when they were bad, they were very good, if you know what I mean.
And that’s the problem with The Lincoln Conspiracy. It’s just…okay: not aggressively terrible, but certainly not memorable, either, in any of those instantly recognizable Sunn Classic ways. After slogging my way through the commentary track provided here by Kino Lorber (the Bataan Death March survivors had it better), I discovered a heretofore unknown fact that probably explains why. The Lincoln Conspiracy never really “took off” for me, either back in 1977, when I sat in that opening matinee and sank lower and lower into my seat, fighting that growing ennui hardcore moviegoers get when they realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods, or now, after getting my long wish of seeing a complete, sparkling widescreen high-def presentation on disc.
You know why it never took off? They hacked it up. According to director James L. Conway, over a half hour of material was excised from the final print, material that featured Sunn Classic Pictures god Brad Crandal, complete with his maps and graphs and charts, helping to explain the picture, along with other historians and experts. Conway states post-production test marketing—a staple of Sunn production before and after a picture was produced—indicated test audiences hated those scenes, so they were simply chopped out (for example, there’s a promotional still of a scientist performing hair analysis on Col. Lafayette C. Baker, to see if he was poisoned. No such footage is present in the final cut).
Big mistake. The whole appeal of so many of those Sunn Classic movies was the semi-documentary approach to the material, spackling over the delightfully unsteady “dramatic recreation” scenes with “Big Brad” sitting in his office mock-up, patiently explaining to us how Jesus walked around Utah, or how Noah’s ark was now teetering on top of some Turkish mountain, or how the world was going to get blown up by aliens so don’t bother doing your homework tonight. Just hearing Crandal’s occasional audio drops here in The Lincoln Conspiracy isn’t enough, despite the obvious goal Conway and Sunn had in making this particular outing more upscale, more “mainstream.”
While it’s certainly fun to see name actors like Bradford Dillman and John Dehner in this low, low budget thriller…in 1977 I could see them on TV any day of the week. It certainly didn’t “sell” me on buying a ticket to The Lincoln Conspiracy (notice: they’re even not featured in the original poster art—not even a “college yearbook” strip of headshots at the bottom). Back in 1977, what I wanted from a Sunn Classic movie was to be scared or awed by some portentous declaration of doom, or some exploration of a past civilization with a shocking revelation not at all dependent on the facts—in fact the more speculative, the better. And what better subject for that kind of treatment than the assassination of Lincoln?
I can’t think of a more appropriate time, too, than 1977, for an American movie audience to be receptive to such a subject, particularly after the schizophrenia of celebrating the Bicentennial right after the Watergate scandal and Vietnam and years of protests and violent riots and the far, far worse tragedy of the election of Jimmy Carter (give me Charlie in the bush anyday over that…). The country was also in the midst of a highly publicized investigation of the Kennedy assassination from the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, a subject that had already been turned into a cottage industry of books and movies and TV programs. So it seems like it would have been a perfect time to bring out a movie that covered two subjects—political corruption and presidential assassination—that were keenly being consumed by the American public.
Don’t misunderstand, however. No doubt The Lincoln Conspiracy sold tickets (one source puts the healthy gross at over $12 million, but who knows? Conway never gives a figure). Conway admits audiences were not as interested in it as his previous Sunn blockbuster, 1976’s In Search of Noah’s Ark, which grossed an astounding $55 million against a minuscule $600,000 budget. How profitable The Lincoln Conspiracy was to Sunn is another matter. Since The Lincoln Conspiracy wasn’t “four-walled,” as was Noah’s Ark, where Sunn would collect every penny of the ticket sales after renting out solitary theaters, it had to rely on the more conventional release pattern of securing a “guarantee” from the theaters to get back a percentage of the ticket sales…which was no guarantee. In other words, the theaters paid only when they were forced to (and good luck getting an honest split, frankly), and at a much later date, causing severe cash flow problems for a small indie like Sunn, which lacked a regular release of product into the market every few weeks.
All of that would have been a mute point if The Lincoln Conspiracy had taken off like Noah’s Ark, but it didn’t. Why? Perhaps because…it plays rather like an average, too-talky TV movie that people could watch for free at home. If the special, gritty Sunn semi-documentary angle was jettisoned in editing, we’re left with talking heads…and precious little action. Sure Dillman and Dehner and Middleton and Bissell all know their jobs, but they can’t make up for the fact that nothing much happens in The Lincoln Conspiracy. We get far too many scenes of people scheming in anonymous hotel rooms, and far too little movement (and “Well…it’s 1970s moviemaking; it’s going to be slower,” isn’t a valid rejoinder to that complaint—some of those 1970s TV movies were the most exciting cinema coming out at that time).
Sure, there are isolated moments of “Sunn Classic Funn,” like that disappearing and reappearing piece of cereal they used for a mole on John Anderson’s face, or his Abe Lincoln make-up design that seems to consist solely of over-painting his lower lip with Max Factor’s #18: “Diana Ross Dazzling White” lip gloss. Or the modern plastic stick-on door numbers featured at that practical location used for the Senate and Capitol office mock-ups (wanna know what that building was? Me, too. NothingBerger never asks). Or the electric cords that keep popping out behind the beams. Our fearless moderator claims people noticing these flubs are “nitpickers.” On the contrary; I wish there had been far more of that kind of rough and whooly approach to The Lincoln Conspiracy. That’s what made those Sunn movies so much fun. “Mainstream respectability” I could get from Hollywood any day.
Inexcusable, however, is Conway cheating us on key sequences that should be in The Lincoln Conspiracy. Incomprehensibly, we never see the actual assassination of the President, just these inept, awkward close-ups of the actors and a derringer, which in terms of editing make little if any sense (every shot just looks like an insert). We don’t even see a stage (Conway says he can’t remember why they didn’t have one, but he acknowledges it was a mistake…a mistake oblivious Berger immediately—and hilariously—contradicts: “You don’t really want to see it! It works perfectly! It can’t not work!” he breathes as he tries not to wet his pants). How can you have a movie called The Lincoln Conspiracy, concerning a treasonous plot to kill the President, and not show one of the most iconic images out of the 19th century historical record: the sight of John Wilkes Booth firing his weapon at the saintly, martyred Lincoln, leaping down to the stage of Ford Theatre screaming, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” as he broke his ankle in a typically spectacular, theatrical manner? Ludicrous.
Perhaps not as obvious but certainly as egregious, Conway rushes through the key conspiracy plot twist here in the final moments of the movie—a mistake he again clearly acknowledges several times on the commentary track, to the protestations of Berger who assures him it’s not necessary (jesus it’s nauseating, the ass-kissing). Again: the movie is called The Lincoln Conspiracy. Yes, we get a solid hour or more of Dehner and Middleton setting up the plot…but we get maybe ten or less of the new, revelatory “twist”—that Booth wasn’t killed in the Garrett’s farm barn. We get a rather flubbed presentation of that shooting and the subsequent burning of the barn (it’s over before it starts, with zero suspense), and a few scenes of the coverup, before Conway has some half-assed, rushed courtroom melodramatics depicting the subsequent assassination inquest, where potentially fascinating tidbits like 18 missing pages of Booth’s diary (like Nixon’s missing 18 minutes on his tapes?) are thrown out and never picked up. Shouldn’t that have been central to the movie, instead of trotted out at the end as an afterthought? At least that plotline offers the possibility of movement and action, both of which are sorely missed in The Lincoln Conspiracy.
As for the commentary track…I’m not at a loss for words, but I should be, considering the stunning results. Director James L. Conway is without a doubt the single most important living source that can contribute to the historical record for Sunn Classic Pictures. He was there, at the beginning, and he did and saw it all. You couldn’t get all the relevant info out of him in twenty DVD commentary tracks, as far as I’m concerned. So tell me why I have to listen to someone like “Howard S. Berger” panting and mewling and literally whining about his experiences watching Conway’s movies…instead of hearing Conway himself tell me about his movies? Is that really a concept Berger can’t understand? I’m not interested in you or your opinion at all, particularly since so many of them are laughably wrong.
During this commentary, Conway touches far too briefly on such important aspects of Sunn’s operations as length of production (Lincoln took only 4 weeks), length of post-production (amazingly, two months tops for Sunn epics), and tantalizing insights into marketing and financing. Are any of these opening gambits followed up on by Berger? No they are not, thank you. Instead, we get constant interruptions from Berger with nonsensical bon mots like, “Your c.v. is repulsively impressive!” (how the hell do you respond to that?), and my favorite, in the middle of what can only be described as Berger going into some kind of transcendental fugue state, “I…I sit here and…you know, I mean I remember, er…something, something so small…hahaha! and now I’m like, and I’m like now, no, this is like really: I remember this!” in this cringing Tarantino whine (he literally sounds like that hack), during an ungodly half-hour or more diatribe about how he sees Conway’s movies (a stunned Conway, no doubt cowed into somnombulance, merely offers an occasional “uh huh,” or an embarrassed chuckle). This isn’t moderation of a commentary track. It certainly isn’t serious movie criticism. It’s not even a simple interview. It’s fucking group therapy with one guy.
Gone is the chance for Conway to expand on his working with Aaron Spelling, or why so many Sunn movies haven’t been released on disc, or specific info on the actual shooting of The Lincoln Conspiracy, or ABOUT A THOUSAND OTHER FUCKING THINGS I CAN THINK OF ASKING that any other serious movie fan would also have killed to ask Conway. Gone. When are we going to finally come out of this cycle where these people like Berger, thanks to the ease of internet visibility, believe their thoughts, their opinions, are not just as important as the projects and the artists they’re talking to or about, but more important? Hey—if Berger, like myself, wants to rant and rave on his own site, more power to him. A salute, as my friend Tony S. would say. Go with God. But when you have the chance to let an artist actually talk who knows something, who can convey information that will actually fill out the historical record…then let them talk. Just let them talk. I already went over this with you, Howard, in my review of Superdome. I don’t want to have to do it again.
PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.
Read more of Paul’s movie reviews here. Read Paul’s TV reviews at our sister website, Drunk TV.