The biopic, a Hollywood staple, invariably says as much, if not more, about the period in which it was made as the one it depicts. The current gold rush to dig up new and old lives reflects, with rare exceptions, the Oprahzation of popular biography in an era of shameless confession. The story arc requires the protagonist to conquer or surrender to a besetting sin. Overcoming means drugs or alcohol, as in “Ray” and “Walk the Line”; succumbing means greed or vanity, as in “Capote” and “Beyond the Sea.”The plots follow a checklist of generic cliches, including flashbacked incidents from childhood.The price of celebrity is analysis in the public square, and we are all analysts – though we are charged a pretty penny for the privilege.

John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939) and Vincente Minnelli’s “Lust for Life” (1956), two of the best biographical films ever made, are not without psychological interest. Made decades before Ritalin and anti-depressants replaced milk and cookies as dietary supplements, they uncannily portray what we now diagnose as clinical depression – Abe’s distant reflections on the death of his mother and sweetheart interspersed with blank-eyed gazes at an indifferent river or mechanical strumming on a Jew’s harp; van Gogh’s perpetual alienation and slumped inertia. Yet both films are liberated from the illusion that explanations are either possible or desirable, both respect the boundaries of the knowable, and both use plot to confront larger issues, chiefly the cost in isolation that greatness demands.

Stylistically, they could not be more different. “Young Mr. Lincoln” uses sentimentality to forge a heroic myth, while “Lust for Life” proffers aesthetic objectivity to weigh the value of an artist’s failed life against the triumph of his art. Sentimentality often guarantees better box office, but is the harder sell over time.

Ford’s detractors are often critics who delight in explaining how a preferred filmmaker manipulates the medium to encourage fear or outrage, while recoiling in contempt at directors who induce tears. In “Young Mr. Lincoln,” Ford resolutely links national memory to the tear ducts and plays on the latter as though they were stops on a pipe organ. Might as well know that going in.

The director’s famously stubborn refusal to elucidate himself or his work or to admit that what he did had anything to do with art seems quaint but also sensible. Art implies intellect, which is unequally distributed, and Ford demands emotion, which ruthlessly seeks out the common denominator in us all. The implication is that if he has your heart, your mind will follow, if only afterward and as justification for losing your emotional grip.

Still, the failings of “Young Mr. Lincoln,” or at least those aspects that may incline us to hold it at bay, can be lost on no one. The central incident in Lamar Trotti’s screenplay is little more than Perry Mason on the prairie: the fictionalized version of a trial in which Lincoln used an almanac to impeach a witness, here turned into a confrontation between two brothers – each claiming to be the culprit to save the other – and the real murderer, who senselessly blurts out his guilt when Abe puts the question. The lameness of that contrivance is made clear by the dreary 1946 radio version, which incorporates nothing else (it is included on Criterion’s DVD).

Henry Fonda’s Lincoln, probably the best we have had or are likely to get, makes too much of his stork legs, folding them like furniture and walking as though on stilts – in a closing scene, he lumbers over a rise during a rainstorm, looking disconcertingly like Frankenstein’s monster. Fonda also overdoes the aw-shucks diffidence, as when he grabs the arm of the mother whose boys are threatened by a lynch mob (the once-radiant Alice Brady in her last role, and showing the illness that soon took her life). She pulls away and asks,”Who are you?” Instantly forgetting the urgency, he does an eight-second modesty shuffle before answering, “I’m your lawyer, ma’am.” At least he doesn’t say,”I’m plain Abraham Lincoln” – which is how he introduces himself in his first speech. You may also object to Ford’s comic relief in the courtroom, as well as Lincoln’s indifference to procedural rules.

Above all, you may cringe at Alfred Newman’s remarkable score, which tugs at the heartstrings Ford merely plucks. If any Ford film suggests a hyphenated authorship, it is “Young Mr. Lincoln,” thanks to Newman’s underscoring of every key moment with traditional themes. His method is forewarned during the credits: “The Battle Cry of Freedom” is sung first by women, as if at a sodality meeting, then with men to beef it up, before it is taken up by hanky-waving strings. New Salem is introduced with a prancing square-dance theme. Abe first rises into view to the somber strains of a lone cello. The death of Ann Rutledge is signaled by a transition from widening circles in a calm river to fearsome ice floes, as strings turn to darkening brasses. If you are put off by Newman’s music, you won’t like Ford’s film, and vice versa.

If, on the other hand, you surrender to the emotional power and complexity of the portrait, you may find yourself marveling at how Ford turned so tidy a script into an epic. From the opening epigram (Rosemary Benet), which sets up Abe’s broken ties to his mother, to the closing shot of the Lincoln Memorial, as the chorus thunders “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Ford uses the audience’s shared knowledge of Lincoln to re-create him as a mythic figure – a Homeric beacon, standing outside history as an exemplar of core values and of a peculiarly un-Homeric and un-American courage that tests its mettle with language.Twice Lincoln threatens to resolve a dispute with fighting; twice, his cleverness obviates the need. And twice his life is altered by the same mother figure, though neither she nor Abe restate the happenstance that the mother of his defendants is the same person who, in the opening scene, gave him his first law book.

Ford’s view of community is hardly rosy, though it is ludicrously homogeneous: no blacks, no talk of slavery, no ethnicities at all – not even a yumpinyimminy Swede or an alcoholic Irishman. But violence is everywhere.At the very moment Abe doffs his hat to the veterans at an Independence Day parade, a few scamps send a military man into the dust with a slingshot. The two bullies of the piece are thoroughly unpleasant and the convincingly crazed lynch mob includes a walk-on character named Buck, played by the eternally unbilled Jack Pennick (a Ford regular whose ugliness has symbolic resonance in this instance).

The courtroom is corrupt in ways Ford doesn’t bother to enumerate; he just shows Stephen Douglass (Milburn Stone, also unbilled) ominously whispering to the prosecutor (Donald Meek, a fly impotently buzzing around Fonda’s giraffe) and the killer (Ward Bond – who else? – casually blowing smoke rings on the witness stand). Perhaps the most disquieting moment is played for laughs as Abe, during jury selection, questions a drunk and approves him for conceding that he doesn’t attend church, drinks, and enjoys lynching, as though all were guilty pleasures without a dime’s difference between them.

As usual with Ford’s finest work, each shot of “Young Mr.Lincoln”is perfectly framed without calling undo attention to itself. By contrast, Minnelli’s framing in “Lust for Life” takes a backseat to the manipulation of color, as Vincent simultaneously progresses as an artist and deteriorates as a man.The film opens up as an extension of his mind, from the burnt umber of the Borinage – where the young would-be evangelist ministers to starving miners – to Paris, the Hague, and Auvers, where Vincent perceives colors as increasingly brilliant,inspiring,threatening, and defeating.

“I have a power of color in me,”Vincent writes brother Theo (a beautifully modulated performance by James Donald); Minnelli rises to the challenge of his “terrible lucidity.” An astonishing shot occurs the morning after Vincent arrives in Arles,when he opens the window and the light is as weighty as when Dorothy opens the door on Oz. At last, the radiant light and color are transferred to canvases that, along with Vincent’s letters, calmly read by Theo, anchor the film in more reality than is cus tomary in biopics.

Kirk Douglas’s resemblance to van Gogh is matched by the commitment of his performance. He physically recedes, especially as the would-be wife to the crass and solitary Gauguin. Anthony Quinn’s Gauguin makes the film jump to attention when he appears, generating a quaking tension with van Gogh’s increasingly intemperate fits of temper, but he doesn’t bring many dimensions to the character. Mr. Douglas dispenses with vanity altogether, playing a social misfit touched with genius, an untouchable outcast that neither Mr. Douglas nor Minnelli insult with maudlin pleas to the audience or cheap historical ironies. Would that the same could be said of Miklos Rosza’s score, consisting largely of a ponderous eightbar melody that he recycled more fittingly for “Ben Hur.”

Criterion’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” DVD has a second disc with extras well worth watching, including half of Lindsay Anderson’s documentary on Ford (the early years), audio interviews with Ford and Fonda, and the Fonda segment from the BBC’s popular Michael Parkinson program. Mr. Parkinson, the anti-Charlie Rose, never interrupts the Hollywood stars he features and elicits an extraordinary archive of candid interviews. The Warners DVD of “Lust for Life” has the intriguingly dotty trailer (which takes the title literally) and utterly inane commentary by the notoriously self-important Dr. Drew Caspary, who gives a potted history of postwar America (many veterans of World War II “wondered what, if anything, victory had achieved”; Playboy published “well-written, articles, cartoons, and centerfolds”) and ignores the film. “Lust for Life” deserves better.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.