Young Mr. Lincoln ($39.95 DVD) At their worst, John Ford and Henry Fonda gave in to sentiment and sanctimony, but this 1939 collaboration neatly skirts both—a miracle, given the subject matter. Fonda, in a story he repeats in several interviews on Criterion's double-disc set, was put off by the prospect of playing Lincoln at first, until John Ford sat him down and told him, "You're not playing the Great Emancipator. You're playing the young jackleg lawyer." (Actually, Ford used more characteristically colorful language, as Fonda admits during the one interview that wasn't intended for public broadcast.) As Fonda plays him, Lincoln is as much a trickster as a leader of men. He settles a dispute between landowners with misdirection and faulty math, providing for his own fee in the bargain, and talks down a mob intent on lynching two brothers accused of murder with a deft blend of conscience and cornpone wit. The murder case, which threatens to pit the brothers against each other, is a subtle prefiguration of the coming Civil War, as is the thunderstorm into which Lincoln walks in the movie's final shot. Shot in dusky tones like a sepia photograph already beginning to blur, Young Mr. Lincoln is mythmaking of a peculiar sort, less interested in foregrounding Lincoln's greatness than establishing his essential Americanness. Criterion's disc is embellished with an excellent documentary spanning Ford's pre-WWII career.

Budd Boetticher Marathon (Sat., March 25, 2:50 p.m., Encore Westerns) Appetite whetted by that Seven Men from Now DVD? Then this four-film Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott marathon is manna from heaven. Decision at Sundown is followed by The Tall T, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, although the last will likely be hacked in half by the channel's usual failure to letterbox. (The previous three are full-frame to begin with.) Still, knocking down half of the Ranown cycle isn't bad for an afternoon's work.

Misc. Picks The much-loved and much-hated Requiem for a Dream screens midnights at the Bryn Mawr (Fri.-Sat.). Secret Cinema pays tribute to everyone's favorite fourth Stooge, Shemp, with an evening of films at Moore College of Art and a tour of the private Stoogeum. (Screening Fri., 8 p.m.; tour Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. See www.thesecretcinema.com for details.) Chestnut Hill Film Group threads Rouben Mamoulian's lighter-than-air Love Me Tonight, with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald (Tue., 7:30 p.m., Chestnut Hill Free Library).