DVDebut worth noting: Salvador Litvak's unusual and beautiful SAVING LINCOLN

Hitting the street on DVD tomorrow, June 18, is one of the more interesting and provocative (regarding its film technique, at least) movies to have appeared this year: SAVING LINCOLN. The film, directed by Salvador Litvak, utilizes a new film-making technique – CineCollage, which makes use of actual Civil War photos (from the Library of Congress) for the green screen backdrops in every scene. Based on fact, the story follows U.S. Marshall Ward Hill Lamon as he shadows Abraham Lincoln as his bodyguard during the Civil War, and it offers everything from Lincoln's love of music and song to his wife's need for a good seance now and then.

Well-acted and -directed and relatively well-written, the movie's a salve for those of us who found the Spielberg feel-good version overlong, over-done and way overproduced. This is small potatoes, budget-wise but its use of the green screen and those wonderful photographs makes for a kind of pageant-like production that is often oddly moving and sometimes wonderfully strange.

My full review of the film when it opened this past winter can be found here.