The Iron Horse

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.

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.

Since I live in Cheyenne, WY this type of movie really appeals to me. As all historians know, various towns along the route of this railroad (which coincides quite closely to interstate 80 in Wyoming) were made during its construction. Cheyenne and Rock Springs (because of its coal mining) were especially notable.

I had seen this movie several years ago and was delighted to see it being broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Perhaps they will re-broadcast it again in the future.

This movie, while not completely accurate historically, certainly gives an idea of the magnitude of the endeavor being undertaken. And it does feature a real locomotive which operated on the railroad during the period portrayed. Historical buffs definitely should not be swayed from enjoying this title simply because it may not strictly conform to history.

I won't go into the story except to say that the various sub-plots keep the viewer very entertained. This was a very well-done movie in my opinion. Acting was very good. And the cinematography was very impressive.

Fans of either westerns or silent-era films certainly should not miss this one.

This film was on my radar for a long time. Saw this few days back on a dvd. Fortunately it was a US version of 2 hours 29 mins but was a lil upset when I heard about the bluray release date set for November. I enjoy watching western films on blurays. This film is an epic about the creation of the first transcontinental railroad. The film portrayed the backbreaking hardwork, the toils of the men and the determination. George O'Brien plays the young man whose father was murdered for finding a shorter route through a gorge. O'Brien is adamant to fulfil his father's dream inspite of obstruction n a murder attempt. I was shocked to know that many poor farmers' land was usurped for the project n this was one of the reason for turning the James brothers into outlaws.

The Iron Horse was both Ford's 50th film and one of the most important silent Westerns. Until the 29-year-old director came to work on this epic project, he had gradually built up an expertise and standing with a number of smaller productions, many of them oaters, few of which survive today. This 1924 film consolidated his talent and gave him a creative reputation which lasted until he was deemed 'old fashioned' at the start of 1950s.

It's a story that characteristically combines the grand with the intimate, through a celebration of the coming of progress. The Iron Horse's narrative covers such issues as the Civil War, Lincoln's presidency, the Indian wars, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, ethnic relationships, cattle trailing and railway history in a span of little over two hours - all with an absence of narrative strain still impressive today. Ford's skill in marshalling many disparate elements into one large canvas, successfully orchestrating history (proudly announced here as 'accurate and faithful in every particular') is one example why he was such an exemplary Western director.

George O'Brien plays Davy Brandon, whose father dreams of rails eventually crossing the continent. After setting out for the west, Brandon senior is killed by the evil Two Fingers (Fred Kohler). Years later Davy sets to work for Union Pacific, scouting for a short cut through Cheyenne territory that will ensure the success of the transcontinental link up. Aiming to prevent this are the dastardly forces of corrupt surveyor Jesson (Peter Chadwick) and half-breed Baumann (Kohler). Meanwhile, Davy discovers his childhood sweetheart Miriam (Madge Bellamy) is engaged to the disreputable Jesson. The rest, as they say, is history.

Throughout Ford's career he was wont to use symbols to indicate the coming of progress in the West. In My Darling Clementine (1946) it was the social dance at the unfinished church. In Liberty Valance (1964) the desert flowers on Tom Doniphon's (Wayne's) coffin. The Iron Horse is dedicated to George Stevenson and, not unexpectedly, here it is the railway itself that represents the growth of civilisation. Its ultimate success as an enterprise is less that of a profitable commercial venture than of beneficial ideal, as visualised by President Lincoln.

Amidst the idealism of railway expansion, Ford includes the broad comedy common to many of his films - the Irish and Italian labourers continuing a friendly rivalry. Their work songs, spelt out in caption cards while they construct the track, punctuate the action, creating convenient breathing spaces between more dramatic scenes. The 'three musketeers' - as Slattery (Francis Powers) Casey (Farrell Macdonald) and Schultz (Jim Welch) are called - have their own amusing scenes based around some frontier dentistry. But essentially they function as a kind of comic chorus, their earthy, ethnic interjections keeping the film's idealism down to earth. There's an element of this too in Judge Haller (James Marcus), a Roy Bean character, whose dispensation of frontier justice is as arbitrary as it is often inspired.

Least convincing to the modern viewer is the character of Miriam, whose simpering virginity comes closest to the two-dimensional women found often in the world of D.W. Griffith's melodramas. Her condemnation of the clean living Davy's visit to the saloon, immediately after being with her (where, ironically, he has gone to patch things up with Jesson) seems almost wilfully annoying; ludicrous even, given the rough environment in which she finds herself. But that her heart belongs to the muscular scout is never in doubt, a fact made clear by their rapport in the opening scenes set in their childhood. In addition, once she has gained womanhood, her pending relationship with Jesson is condemned by implication as President Lincoln looks askance at their match. The same dramatic shorthand is employed through the palpable tension when Davy and Baumann first meet, an impending confrontation telegraphed as sharply as any message sent by mechanical means.

There is also a intense psychological antipathy between Davy and Jesson, notably in the standout barroom scene. In these moments O'Brien plays well, almost making one forget Ford's great films with Wayne to come. But, by necessity, this is principally a film of the great outdoors where Ford excels in portraying man battling against external obstacles, rather than facing internal stress. In his Stagecoach (1938), which was to later revitalise the genre, it would be a different story, one of comparative intimacy. Here, the heroes and villains who react together along the railroad work out their differences in the open air with grand gestures, fisticuffs and work songs, rather than anguished conversation. And it is these epic scenes that remain in the mind when the film is done. The attack of the Indians on the supply train, their furious shadows thrown against the sides of the carriages; the snow swept work camps; the many panoramas of frontier life; Davy and Bauman's final conflict in the sleeper 'house'; the final meeting at Promontory Point for the 'wedding of the rails', and so on.

Such visual grandness does not preclude economy however. One only has to think of hurriedly arranged burial of 'the old soak' and the marriage held at North Platte, or the establishing scenes at the beginning of the film, to see how Ford was fully in command of his material, switching scale and focus with ease.

With the joining of the two railroads and the closing of the bond between Miriam and Davy, there is a natural conclusion to both the human, and the mechanical elements of the story - Davy actually waits until the final spike has been driven home before committing himself to her side. Thematically, Fritz Lang was to acknowledge a debt to Ford's classic in his Western Union (1938), which has a related story, but his film is the slighter of the two and less innocent. Ford's epic remains the definitive telling of these particular events and its authenticity can still be recommended today.