El caballo de hierro

Iron Horse, The (1924)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

John Ford's first epic was a massive production for Fox who pretty much spent a ton of money hoping that the film would bring people in, which it eventually did. The film made a ton of money for Fox but more important it took Ford out of the gutters of "B" Westerns and made him a director to be reckoned with. The film tells the "true" story of the first transcontinental railroad as Davy Brandon (George O'Brien) tries to fulfill the dreams of his father who was killed by Indians years earlier. Davy must also try to win the heart of a former love (Madge Bellamy) while fighting off a man who wants to see the railroad fail. There's no question that Ford and Fox pretty much threw everything into this film and you can tell because it's story is all over the place. While I think the film isn't nearly as good as its reputation you still can't help but be impressed by many of the visuals. According to legend there were over 6000 people employed on the production with most of them being extras to give all the scenes a more epic look. I'd believe this legend because the scenery is downright beautiful to look at and there's no question that it has the look of a mammoth epic. The highlight for me were all the scenes where we see the railroad being built as the boards are placed and railings hammered down. There were many future films that dealt with the railroad but I must say this one here makes it look the most realistic. We get many other great action scenes including countless fights with the Indians where once again you can see the large scale with the amount of people, horses and of course stunt men. I think what really hurts the film is the fact that it really doesn't tell a clear story. I'm not sure if the film originally ran much longer but the 135-minute running time feels way too long but the reason for this is that so much happens and often times it doesn't really connect together. Instead of telling one full story, it seems the screenplay bounces all over the place and tries to tell as much as possible. One minute we're dealing with the railroad and then we jump to some town being built up. One moment we're dealing with the Indians but the next moment we're worried about the dress Bellamy is going to wear. It feels as if we're just getting countless vignettes pieced together without much need to bring everything together. Perhaps Fox was going for a Cecil B. DeMille type epic but this here didn't fully work. The film starts off saying that the history is true but that's clearly not the case as there are certain historic figures used in the film that had no place in the original events (like Buffalo Bill). Both O'Brien and Bellamy are good in their roles as are Cyril Chadwick, George Waggner, Will Walling and Charles Edward Bull who plays President Lincoln. THE IRON HORSE is certainly worth watching once for its importance to film history and while there are many impressive moments on the whole I think the film comes up a tad bit short.

A young boy grows to fulfill his murdered father's vision of seeing THE IRON HORSE, the mighty transcontinental railway, stitch the country together, binding East to West.

Bursting with excitement & patriotic fervor, THE IRON HORSE is the film which put young director John Ford on the cinematic map. He brought together all he had learned from years of making shorter, smaller films and he produced a product which heralded his enormous contributions to sound films in the years to come. This is a `director's picture' in that the stars, as good as they are, are almost negligible; what was important here was Ford's vision & his ability to place it before the audience. Indeed, he does not even bring his leading man (George O'Brien) on screen until 45 minutes into the story - a shortcut to disaster almost anywhere else.

(In all fairness it should be noted that O'Brien, handsome & strong-limbed, does very well as the gentle hero. He would find similar roles in other epic films of the decade. J. Farrell MacDonald, as Irish Corporal Casey, is the prototype for many comically eccentric fellows who would appear in other Ford westerns.)

The film often takes on the aspects of an ancient newsreel. Cattle drives, Indian attacks & endless track laying all look utterly real. Particularly fascinating is the depiction of the dismantlement of the end-of-the-track town, so that not even a dog is left, as it is moved many miles further on to the west. This type of arcane information is what makes watching very old films so enjoyable.

THE IRON HORSE represented the largest migration out of Hollywood for location shooting up to that time. Nothing like this had been attempted before, so Ford & his lieutenants were forced to make up the rules as they went along.

Hiring a circus train, the small army of extras arrived at the subzero Nevada location in January of 1924. The conditions which greeted them were authentically primitive. It was so cold, the extras quickly began sleeping in their costumes. Finding the train to be flea ridden, they moved into the sets and began living exactly as the characters they were portraying. The female extras especially suffered from the rugged conditions. A frontier mindset seemed to take over many of the cast & crew; the circus tent, which doubled as both the movie saloon and the crew's commissary, eventually had to have the catsup bottles removed from the tables to discourage the many fights which kept breaking out.

Authenticity found its way into the movie in other, more positive, ways. Several of the elderly Chinese extras, representing laborers on the Central Pacific, had actually worked on the real McCoy sixty years previous. They came out of retirement to appear in the film & enjoyed themselves immensely. Ford also managed to locate the two original locomotives which met at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 and reunited them for the film's climax.

Composer John Lanchbery has contributed a splendid soundtrack to the restored video version, incorporating several contemporaneous tunes of the period. It would be intriguing to double bill THE IRON HORSE with Cecil B. DeMille's UNION PACIFIC (1939), which tells the same historical story, but with a completely different tack & set of fictional characters.

1st watched 10/25/2013 -- 7 out of 10(Dir-John Ford): Epic silent movie about the path to the completion of the transcontinental railroad seen thru the eyes of the son of a dream-filled mid-westerner, played by George O'Brien in adulthood. This movie does a pretty good job of portraying the conflicts in the effort -- while throwing in some romance with a few fist fights. John Ford, the King of the Western, directed this early movie and is not afraid to show men having emotion and being aggressive as males are expected to be. George's character, Dave Brandon, travels with his father to the west in search of helping the railroad get built, but his father is killed by a white man dressed as an Indian and traveling with their tribe. This man becomes the evil character in the film an we find out he also is tight with the railroad executives and owns a lot of land. We believe his intention is to make sure the railroad goes thru his areas so they will thrive and make him money although it is not really dramatized. This piece is somewhat historical in nature with some comedy, romance and violence thrown in coming a lot from the romantic triangle between Brandon, his childhood girlfriend and her new fiancé. The fight scenes are a little corny and sometimes un-necessary but some of the emotions come out due to this and help the film, in my opinion. Ford makes the film entertaining and not just a bland documentary which it could have been. His ability to entertain an audience shines and the film also teaches which is a positive thing as well. Overall -- a worthwhile film although not perfect.

In the mid-1920s cinema saw the second coming of the epic, the first having been in the mid-1910s, and giants of the era such as Douglas Fairbanks and Cecil B. DeMille were continually upping the ante on each other with bigger and bigger pictures. Meanwhile the Western had been in gradual development, and by now it was only logical that this ever-popular genre was itself given a massiveness makeover. Paramount had the first stab with The Covered Wagon in 1923, and the following year Fox responded with The Iron Horse.

The Western itself of course went through many developments in theme, and can be grouped into different phases. The Iron Horse, along with Covered Wagon, Three Bad Men (1926) and The Big Trail (1930) belongs squarely to the "pioneer" Westerns which dominate this era. In these pictures the west would typically be an unclaimed wilderness, and the heroes were those who explored, settled and developed it. By now the genuine old west was fading from living memory, and so now we had the first generation for whom it could be a romanticised piece of history. Plus of course there is the fact that the wagon trails, railroads and cattle drives of the pioneer Western were ideal for the aforementioned fashion for epic pictures.

Today of course The Iron Horse is best remembered for its director – a young John Ford. Even back then Ford had a close association with the Western, although to some extent his style is still in development here. His shot composition relies heavily on very distinctive framing devices such as tree branches or posts, and sometimes the shots look a little cluttered. Also, his approach to the romantic love scenes is entirely conventional – with close-ups, rhyming angles and sparse backgrounds so as to focus on the actors. The older (more cynical?) John Ford tended to shoot these moments rather flatly, the camera hanging back, and even throwing in distracting background business.

On the other hand, and perhaps in ways that matter more, this is very much the same John Ford of Stagecoach, Fort Apache and so forth. In particular is his vision of the west. Right from the opening scenes he contrasts the smallness of the homestead with the romantic allure of the wilderness – framing the actors tightly in the opening shots, and then cutting to point-of-view shots of the trail. He always captures the vastness of the outdoors, and yet without ever dwarfing the people in it. Particularly impressive (and this is perhaps where Ford's greatest strength lay) is his ability to combine different storytelling elements in a single shot – for example at one point we see a mother mourn her son at his grave in the foreground, while a heavily loaded train passes through in the background.

Another typically Fordian element is the precedence he gives to the comic relief characters. On location they were largely working without a script, so Ford could spin their scenes out as long as he wanted. As with many of his later pictures, charming though it is, the comedy business threatens to unbalance the real story. We can also see in "Drill ye terriers" a forerunner to the group singsong that is a staple of even the earliest John Ford talkies.

A nod to the actors is also due. This was George O'Brien's first lead role and he doesn't do badly, considering he got the part mainly for being a good-looking newcomer who could ride a horse. He doesn't emote too convincingly, but he moves well which is the most important thing for a picture like this. The other standout is J. Farrell MacDonald, who played the kind of roles for Ford in the silent era that would later be filled by Victor McLaglan in the talkies – basically a comical Irish drunk. But like McLaglan he hid real dramatic talent under the act, and he emerges as the most genuine player in this piece.

Ford's confidence and passion for the genre make the Iron Horse a classic, but it's worth remembering that The Iron Horse is also a triumph of post-production. Cast and crew had gone on location without a complete shooting script and large chunks of it are more or less improvised. As well as directing Ford took one of his earliest credits of producer and, would thus have been able to continue supervising the product after shooting was over. It's hard to imagine what any other producer or editor would have made of the footage he brought back from location. It's unlikely they would have kept so much of the comic diversions and "oirishness", and it's perhaps with The Iron Horse that we have - for better or for worse - the earliest example of an unbridled John Ford.

In Springfield, the surveyor Brandon dreams on building the first transcontinental railroad while his skeptical friend Thomas Marsh (Will Walling), who is a small constructor, believes he is nothing but a dreamer chasing a rainbow; their children Davy Brandon and Miriam Marsh are best friends. Brandon heads with Davy to the west, where he finds a possible pass for the railroad. However, a group of Cheyenne led by a white renegade kills and scalps Brandon; Davy, who is hidden, sees that the killer has only two fingers in his right hand. In June 1862, President Abraham Lincoln (Charles Edward Bull) authorizes the construction of two railroads: the Union Pacific from Omaha, Nebraska, to West; and the Central Pacific, from Sacramento, California, to East. His old friend Thomas Marsh is responsible for the construction of the Union Pacific and his daughter Miriam (Madge Bellamy) is engaged of his engineer Jesson (Cyril Chadwick). After many incidents during the construction, Thomas Marsh is short of money and he needs to find a shortcut other than the original route through Smoky River. However, the powerful Bauman (Fred Kohler) that owns the lands where the railroad should pass, bribes Jesson to keep the original route. When the grown-up Davy (George O'Brien) appears in the town bringing the mail, Miriam is glad in meeting him and he tells to Thomas that his father had discovered a pass through the Black Hills. Thomas assigns Jesson to ride with Davy to check the ravine, but Bauman convinces the engineer to kill the rival. Jesson cuts the rope that Davy is using to descent to the pass; returns to town and tells that Davy had an accident and died. However, when Davy returns to town, he discloses the truth and the situation of the engineer becomes unbearable. The desperate Bauman uses the two fingered renegade to convince the Cheyenne to war against the workers and Davy has the chance to meet the killer of his father. On 10 May 1869, the locomotives 116 and Jupiter meets each other in the intersection of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific.

"The Iron Horse" is indeed an impressive silent epic western of John Ford. Of course this western is flawed, with excessive patriotism, subplots and running time of 150 minutes. But considering the limited and primitive technical resources in 1924, it is amazing how the director could have made, for example, the scene of the stampede or the Cheyenne attack. Further, there are unusual angles of camera and the take from below the train arriving to save the workers is sensational in the prime cinema that used huge cameras. The plot seems to be based on the true story of the two North-American transcontinental railroads and the lead story of Davy, Miriam and her father is engaging. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Cavalo de Ferro" ("Iron Horse")