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Under discussion:

Abraham Lincoln  (1930)

The Birth of a Nation  (1915)

W.  (2008)

At various turns, Abraham Lincoln (1930), D.W. Griffith’s first and most notorious sound film, comes off as the legendary director’s W.– the story of a simple, silly good ole boy’s rise to the U.S. Presidency. Walter Huston portrays young Abe as a tough but bumbling doof, romantic daydreamer and idle underachiever. Even his bride-to-be, Mary Todd, curses him as a “country baboon” at one point. But the rest of the film illustrates every last Honest Abe tall tale. Well, in that sense, it’s a lot like W., too: When in presidential mode, Huston’s Lincoln is as uncanny a reproduction of a national myth as Josh Brolin’s George W. Bush is of a national disgrace.

At other moments, Abraham Lincoln is Griffith’s Nixon, a strong example of a film director tempering his political convictions in order to embrace an unlikely subject. The filmmaker who re-invigorated the Ku Klux Klan with Birth of a Nation treats the Great Emancipator as a complex, admirable character. Early on, Griffith establishes wild young Lincoln as the hardiest fighter, drinker and railsplitter in Illinois. He’s a brash man’s man but gets all goofy and impulsive around his first great love, society girl Anne Rutledge (Una Merkel) . Griffith presents this historically contested relationship (no solid evidence of the affair with married Rutledge exists) as the experience that sobered Abe into mature leadership. Anne’s sudden death from typhoid sends Abe into a depressed stupor from which he emerges sounding like a far-seeing prophet.

During Lincoln’s rise as a self-taught Illinois lawyer and legislator, he catches the eye of feisty debutante Mary Todd (Kay Hammond), whose society matchmakers are steering her toward powerhouse Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas. “A lot of people seem to think a man named, uh, Abraham Lincoln is going even further than Mr. Douglas,” Mary says. Her friend shrieks,”Why Mary Todd, have you gone crazy? You compare an unknown cornfield lawyer with a brilliant, cultured gentleman like Stephen A. Douglas?” (This is screenwriting for our times: transparent as a Baggie.)

But no one is more down on Lincoln than old Abe himself: “[I] got less property and owe more debts than anybody that ever run for legislature.” When Ms. Todd aggressively pursues him, he panics: “That woman scares me… smart as pepper and pretty, too.” Even at the wedding, when advised to take a drink to calm his nerves, he frets, “My legs are too frightened to pay any attention to liquor.”

After triumphing at the famed Lincoln-Douglas debate on the abolition of slavery, Lincoln nevertheless loses the race for Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate to Democratic incumbent Douglas. He remains wracked with self-loathing. “I’m 50 years old… a failure at everything. If I died today, nobody’d ever know I’d lived.” A moment later a Republican party representative reports that the debates have made Lincoln a national figure and asks that he become the party’s candidate for president.

Tensions in the South are “boiling over” as Abe puts it, illustrated by a brief scene of a dashing Virginian of Rhett Butler looks and Ashley Wilkes manners exhorting a pro-slavery mob. The man declares personal war on “every abolitionist who dares defile the soil of Old Virginia!” “Who’s that?” says a bystander. “Oh, that’s the actor John Wilkes Booth. He can’t act, but the women don’t know it.”

Griffith shows a nice bit of narrative economy by indicating Lincoln’s election victory through a simple, quiet closeup of Mary’s hand scratching out the word “Passenger” on a luggage tag and replacing it with “President” in her dainty script. Abe laughs warmly offscreen, and we see his hand pat Mary’s. “Awww, Mary…”

In Abraham Lincoln, the president’s advisers oppose his drumbeat to civil war (like the lefties, moderates and traditional conservatives who questioned Bush’s Iraq War) and attempt to control him (like Bush’s neocon puppetmasters): “Then we agree… that we must yield to the demands of the South and evacuate Fort Sumter. We agree that our president must be firmly guided by us. We must make every effort to control his inexperienced judgment.” Abe’s not having it. He steps up and asserts his role as the decider: “I will shoulder all responsibility,” he says, ordering relief troops to Fort Sumter in preparation for a Confederate assault. Griffith’s, Huston’s and cinematographer Karl Struss’s finest moment in the film lingers on Lincoln’s grave reaction after having just signed a request for 75,000 troops to kick off the war. A daugerrotype come to chilling life.

Speaking of: Huston’s resemblance to Lincoln grows more astonishing as he “ages” decades, adopting the famous jawline beard and stovepipe hat. (Good thing, since, in an early scene where Abe seduces Ms. Rutledge, Huston wears heavy silent movie eyeliner and lipstick that evoke his granddaughter Anjelica Huston circa 1988.) The screen Mary Todd Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant are also shocking photocopies of the originals.

Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of Griffith’s worst films because of its stilted dawn-of-the-talkies dialogue and staging, but I found it to be at least as dynamic and diverting a political cartoon as Oliver Stone’s latest historical tossed salad. Kill the sound and you’ll catch some signature Griffith moments of visual play, like the montage of marching boots, cavalry and cannons assembling for war in an insane rush. His whip pans to visual punchlines pack as much wit and electricity as John Ford’s. Griffith’s legacy lies in these scattered contributions to film grammar and the art of historical pageantry, not his politics or historical accuracy. Oliver Stone is staring at a similar, enviable fate.

Under discussion:

Cherry Hill High  (1976)

The Last Detail  (1973)

Detroit Rock City  (1999)

Road Trip  (2000)

Almost Famous  (2000)

Fat Girl  (2001)

Y Tu Mamá También  (2002)

Crossroads  (2002)

Mouth to Mouth  (2006)

College  (2008)

Sex Drive  (2008)

As far as Hollywood is concerned, the best way to lose one’s virginity is on the road. Whether driving cross-country for a sure thing or making a weekend trip to the state university in an attempt to get laid, teens are always taking sex-seeking trips in the movies. Already this year, there was College, which featured some high school kids having sex on a campus far from home, and now this week sees the release of Sex Drive, a movie about a guy traveling 500 miles in order to hook up a girl he met online, just so he doesn’t begin college a virgin.

Though it may be wrong to celebrate movies that could possibly be encouragement for online predators and purveyors of sex tourism, we present some of our favorite cinematic virgins who lost it on a road trip:

(Warning: potential spoilers ahead.)

Kyle Edwards (DJ Qualls) in Road Trip (2000)

This movie has to be the first on anyone’s mind when thinking about virginity loss on a road trip. Not necessarily because of the title, either. Kyle’s first time is simply one of the most memorable sexual initiations ever put on film. With all due respect to the large ladies out there, seeing Kyle shyly get it on with big girl Rhonda (Mia Amber Davis) is hilarious. Of course, much of the humor of the scene also comes from how scrawny, pale and dorky Kyle is.

Lucy Wagner (Britney Spears) in Crossroads (2002)

After deciding not to lose her virginity in the boring setting of home-territory, Lucy embarks on a trip that will see her meet her mother for the first time, enter a singing contest, and have her first sexual experience with a guy she’s just recently met. It’s a little more romantic than it sounds, though, as her chosen partner has just co-written a song with her, and he’s made sure to initiate the encounter near an open window providing a view of the ocean. Even if this guy turns out to be a jerk later on, it has to be worth it, because there’s no way a girl could have a more special first time than that.

Sherry (Ellen Page) in Mouth to Mouth (2005)

Before she became an icon of teen pregnancy, future Oscar-nominee Ellen Page appeared in this indie, which featured the following plot synopsis: “How Sherry loses her virginity, her illusions and her lip ring in one trippy road trip across Europe.” As you can see in the video above, it’s not quite as special a first time as Britney got.

William Miller (Patrick Fugit) in Almost Famous (2000)

One of the benefits of being a band on tour is all the road sex from groupies galore. But do tag-along journalists usually get such perks, too? They do if they’re virginal teenagers, and the groupies are as gracious as the typically non-intercourse-having “Band-Aides.” Based on director Cameron Crowe’s own first time while on the road with rock bands in the 1970s, young Rolling Stone reporter William manages the perfect teen male fantasy by being deflowered by three hot female rock fans.

Jeremiah ‘Jam’ Bruce (Sam Huntington) in Detroit Rock City (1999)

Another reason to believe that teens of the ’70s commonly lost their virginity while en route to rock concerts. In this movie, the experience isn’t as much a fantasy as the one in Almost Famous, though it is nearly as unbelievable. Jam and his buddies travel from Cleveland to Detroit for a Kiss show, and it just so happens that the kid’s crush, Beth, has apparently also made the trip and followed him into a church, where they do it in a confessional booth. And after Jam officially becomes a man, he has the strength to finally stand up to his mom.

Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) in The Last Detail (1973)

It’s one thing for a guy to want to lose his virginity before he goes to college; it’s another for a guy to need to lose it before beginning an 8-year sentence behind bars. While being escorted by two fellow sailors (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) to Portsmouth Naval Prison, Meadows is shown a good time on the road, and while he doesn’t manage to experience “the big one” in the sequence above, he finally does the deed courtesy of his buddies and a young prostitute played by Carol Kane.

The girl who does it in a shark tank in Cherry Hill High (1977)

While on a post-graduation long-distance bicycle trip, a group of girls hold a contest to see who can lose her virginity in the most creative way. If the prize went to the most dangerous deflowering, certainly the first girl to get it on would have sealed the deal, because her first time is with a shark wrangler in a shark tank. (to see a slideshow clip of the scene, click on the above still.)

Tenoch Iturbide (Diego Luna) and Julio Zapata (Gael Garcia Bernal) in Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)

Best friends Tenoch and Julio are anything but virginal when they embark on a road trip with the beautiful, older Luisa (Maribel Verdu), but by the end of their little vacation, they do end up having an experience that could be technically considered a loss of virginity.

Anais Pingot (Anais Reboux) in Fat Girl (2001)

In one of the most shocking endings ever, 12-year-old Anais accomplishes her goal of the summer while traveling from her vacation home back to Paris. If you’ve never seen it before, I don’t want to spoil it (the above video is merely the film’s trailer), but I’ll say one thing: it may be the most startling intentional loss of virginity ever put on film.

Don’t ask. Just see for yourself.

[Via Frangry]