Lawyers, Guns and Money: An occasional series on movies, TV and other stories about lawyers and the law — Young Mr. Lincoln  (1939, Dir. John Ford) 

A tall, folksy man in a stovepipe hat rides into town on a mule, looking to get his law practice off the ground. He quickly ingratiates himself to the community, making fast friends and even judging a pie contest at the county fair (where he also wins a rail-splitting contest, naturally). Like a good lawyer, or perhaps just a hungry lawyer, he weighs his pie duties carefully, going back and forth between the peach and the apple, steadily gobbling down both. He’s a man of the people, and soon he’ll become a rather impromptu defense attorney in a murder trial.

Much of the appeal of The Young Mr. Lincoln lies in the fact that this green lawyer will one day become perhaps the greatest of all U.S. presidents. But that’s still a ways in the future. Set in the 1830s, John Ford’s film is a fictionalized portrait of the Great Emancipator as a young lawyer, beginning to spread his wings in Springfield, Illinois, courting a headstrong young woman named Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver) and laying on the Everyman vibe as only Henry Fonda could — even with a prosthetic nose.