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**** “Young Mr. Lincoln.” “Drums Along the Mohawk.”

Key. $19.95.

In these two 1939 historical films--by director John Ford, screenwriter Lamar Trotti and star Henry Fonda--Ford’s view of history as a dream, a poem and a battleground of fiery action crystallizes to near perfection. In “Mohawk,” the joys and trials of a young American couple in Revolutionary War times are shown with richness and sweep. In the lyrical masterpiece “Lincoln”--which Eisenstein said he would have been proud to have made--we get a low-key, humorous, gentle precis of the qualities of greatness prefigured in the adventures (mostly apocryphal) of the youthful Lincoln. Nothing of Lincoln’s later career is shown, but all of it is suggested in the succession of touching, funny or frightening incidents that Ford shows, and which Fonda, in a brilliantly underplayed performance, enacts and embodies.