Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Frank Lampard One gets an indication as to what fiction is being perpetrated very early in this film. It comes upon the death of Lincoln, when Andrew Johnson and his wife both state that he was chosen as Vice President by Lincoln because he wanted Johnson to be the man that replaced him if something happened to Lincoln. Say what!? Johnson was chosen by Lincoln for one purpose, to steal Democratic votes that Lincoln worried he might need in what was shaping up as a tight race in 1864. As it turns out, that ridiculous scene is one of the more believable scenes in this ridiculous farce of a movie. Johnson was a semi-illiterate, deeply racist, hotheaded, buffoon. However, this film paints him as one of the greatest human beings ever to grace this country. Would have loved to see how they handled his "Round the Circle" speeches, where a drunken Johnson cursed out anybody that raised a voice to him. This film was just plain silly.

Neil Doyle VAN HEFLIN as Andrew Johnson and RUTH HUSSEY as his wife both give earnest performances and the screenplay, while fictionalizing certain points for dramatic license, is a good one. But, as usual, history buffs are going to nitpick the inaccuracies to the point of dismissing the film as fiction. Not true. What it does do is make anyone who watches it want to consult the history books--and that's a good thing if you want to know the whole story behind Johnson being the first president in history against whom impeachment charges were made.As his adversary in the impeachment process, LIONEL BARRYMORE delivers another one of his more restrained performances without overdoing the ham. He and Heflin share some pretty dramatically effective moments, both of them in fine form. Heflin takes the character of Johnson from his humble beginnings as a tailor to his marriage to Hussey and his gradual emergence as a spokesmen for the people of Tennessee. For the sake of running time, it skips most of the years leading up to the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination, compressing all of those events and managing to keep the screenplay a tightly knit focus on the impeachment process itself. Only quibble is it fails to make clear the strongest point of the impeachment.VAN HEFLIN plays most of his role in appropriate age make-up (as does Hussey) and they're both terrific. In lesser roles, MARJORIE MAIN, REGIS TOOMEY and CHARLES DINGLE provide colorful support.Summing up: May not be a complete history lesson, but it will certainly cause viewers to probe more deeply into the detailed background of historical interest. And it does serve to remind us what a fine actor Van Heflin was in a demanding role.

Robert J. Maxwell That letter Lincoln was supposed to have sent Johnson has kind of puzzled me. After all, it is read out loud twice. It SOUNDS like Lincoln's prose style, but I'd never heard of any other reference to it. So I posted the question on a Civil War news groups. Here's one of the exchanges."Robert Maxwell" wrote> It's generally agreed that at the second inauguration, Andrew Johnson was skunk drunk when he took the oath and tried to make his speech. I just watched the movie, "Tennessee Johnson," and it appears that Johnson was ill during the inauguration and that Lincoln later sent him a letter saying something like, "If you took a drink more often, you would know better than to take brandy on an empty stomach because you are ill. I know you only were there because I asked you to be." Does anyone know if this letter ever existed? Reply. "Having worked for three years as an assistant editor with The Papers of Andrew Johnson and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Association, which is engaged in supporting projects to edit the papers of the sixteenth president, I can safely say that no one I know has ever claimed such a letter to exist."Anyone interested in the impeachment of Johnson might watch the first 20 minutes of Blight's lecture on the subject, on open courses from Yale. Don't be intimidated by "college" or "Yale". (I went there and it's not that demanding.) Blight gives an informative, objective, and lively presentation of the material -- interrupted briefly by somebody yelling "Let my people go," to which Blight replies, "You're free to leave...I hope that guy doesn't have a gun." http://academic earth.org/lectures/black-reconstruction-economics-of-land-and-laborPlease eliminate the space between "academic" and "earth". It's only there because IMDb.com doesn't allow words that are too long, like floccinaucinihilipilification.

capitan_movie The story of the first US president to be impeached gets the Hollywood treatment. It is superbly acted although glossed up quite a bit. Some of Johnson's flaws are exposed, but not nearly as many as are excused. Barrymore's Stevens is terrifyingly brilliant. This is an art that Hollywood used to excel at -- telling history in an interesting and mostly factual matter without the need to flaunt the director's abject cynicism.