Abraham Lincoln’s self-appointed bodyguard and biographer, Ward Hill Lamon, apparently spent the rest of his life explaining why he wasn’t present at Ford’s Theatre on the night Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.
Salvador Litvak’s odd and not entirely uninteresting little docudrama, “Saving Lincoln,’’ presents Lamon, who had been Lincoln’s law partner in Illinois, being grilled by other former partners as the body of the Great Emancipator lies in state.
Lincoln (a fine Tom Amandes of TV’s “Everwood’’) had been friends for two decades with Lamon (Lea Coco), a banjo-strumming Virginian who sings several songs in the movie, sometimes joined by Lincoln.
Promised an ambassadorship to Paris, Lamon instead agreed to Lincoln’s pleas that he become federal marshal for the District of Columbia, to protect his friend.
Though Lamon would sleep outside Lincoln’s bedroom, it wasn’t an easy job. There were conflicts with Lincoln’s official bodyguards, and Lincoln himself liked to give his security detail the slip now and then.
According to Lamon and the film, Lincoln, who escaped an assassination plot while en route by train to his inauguration in 1861, became convinced his life was being spared by God until the Civil War was over.
In the strangest episode, the president pushes aside Lamon and makes his way onto an active battlefield with bullets whizzing around him.
There seems to be a vaguely homoerotic undercurrent in the two men’s relationship, which is never dramatically developed.
Unlike Steven Spielberg’s much longer “Lincoln,’’ which is tightly focused on the last four months of the president’s life and his struggle to get the 13th Amendment passed by the House of Representatives, Litvak’s shoestring production sketches in episodes from Lincoln’s entire administration, including a strange “Dixie’’ singalong on the White House steps to mark the end of the war.
The actors — including Penelope Ann Miller as the unfortunate Mary Todd Lincoln and Bruce Davison as Secretary of State William Seward — performed on a green-screen stage and were electronically composited into Civil War-era black-and-white photographs.
This gimmick — employed in various forms for decades on TV — lends “Saving Lincoln’’ a novel look for a feature film, but doesn’t do much to lend dramatic credibility to Lamon’s more incredible stories, including the president joining Mrs. Lincoln for a séance to communicate with their dead son Willie.