The Prisoner of Shark Island

Abraham Lincoln has been on the edge of a few of John Ford’s work, most notably The Iron Horse where he was the impetus for the overall action of building a transcontinental railroad (Ulysses S. Grant deserved no mention, apparently). Here, Ford tells the story of a man accused of conspiracy in the assassination of Lincoln, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, a Maryland country doctor who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth after Booth’s jump from the balcony at Ford’s Theater and before word of the dee...