America is divided against itself as a controversial presidential contender takes the White House and the country prepares for war… and it’s all the Republicans’ fault!

Surprisingly, we’re talking about a movie set in 1861 and the divisive Commander in Chief is now universally beloved Illinois rail-splitter Abraham Lincoln. Following the recommendation of several posters to my blog entry about movies set aboard moving trains, I caught up with Anthony Mann’s antebellum conspiracy thriller The Tall Target (1951). The screenplay by George Worthington Yates (Them!) and Art Cohn (fated to die in the same airplane crash that claimed the life of Mike Todd) from an original story by Yates and Daniel Mainwaring (signing himself as “Geoffrey Homes”) begins in New York City in February of 1861, as President-Elect Abraham Lincoln prepares for his inauguration against a backdrop of civil unrest that we all know will lead to the American Civil War in less than two months.

Dick Powell stars as Manhattan police sergeant John Kennedy, who has in the performance of his duties as a presidential bodyguard learned of a conspiracy to kill Lincoln before he can deliver his inauguration speech in Baltimore. Presenting his evidence of a secret society that has bankrolled twenty assassins to converge on the inauguration site at once, Kennedy is laughed out of his supervisor’s office… prompting the maverick cop to turn in his badge in disgust and fly solo. Boarding the 10:00 Nightflyer to Baltimore, Kennedy is shocked to find police contact Reegis Toomey murdered… and worse yet, the corpse falls off the train, so that Kennedy has no physical evidence the crime was even committed. Now a civilian with no official standing or even a service revolver, Kennedy must use his wits to keep ahead of an assassin whose face he does not know… but who knows his face all too well.

The list of potential suspects is as long as the list of passengers. Could the shooter be uptight West Point lieutenant Marshall Thompson, his Georgia peach of a sister (Paula Raymond), “smooth-talking rascal” Leif Erickson, “fuddy duddy abolitionist” Florence Bates, the reclusive Mr. Gibbons, whose medical condition requires absolute peace and quiet and who communicates to the outside world via his hatchet-faced wife (Katherine Warren), or perhaps even brevet Army colonel Adolph Menjou, who seems a little too helpful to be entirely trustworthy. As in The Parallax View, Powell’s unofficial snooping eventually marks him as a suspect, forcing him to think fast to evade the very police whose job he’s trying to do.

Look, Rachel… I’m no Republican or abolitionist. But I guarded Mr. Lincoln while he was campaigning in New York. I opened a window for him. He held a door for me. I found a parcel for him, some nightshirts back from the laundry. I was only with him forty-eight hours, but when he left he shook my hand, thanked me and wished me well. I was never so taken with a human man.

Brought in at an economical 78 minutes (would that contemporary political thrillers be this concise), The Tall Target is both a crackerjack Old School thriller and a fascinating reminder of how little American politics have changed over the course of the last century and a half. This “forgotten chapter in American history” is particularized with interesting period details, such as an under-construction Washington Capital building, the use of muzzle-loading handguns rather than six-shooters and a scene in which the Nightflyer is pulled by horses through Baltimore so as not to soil local clotheslines with the black soot from its locomotive. Hanging over the film is the fact that Abraham Lincoln would die from an assassin’s bullet only five years later – a grim reminder that gives The Tall Target an added layer of meaning that lingers long after the final fadeout.