Le cheval de fer

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.

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.

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.

Previous to directing The Iron Horse, John Ford had been known as the director of a few dozen B westerns, most of them probably lost by now and most of them starring Harry Carey. In getting the assignment for The Iron Horse, Ford got his first really big budget to work with from Fox Films. The end result was a film which along with Paramount's The Covered Wagon became the models for the big epic westerns. And it launched a whole new career for John Ford that netted four Oscars as a Best Director, though not one of them was for a western.

The story of The Iron Horse begins here in Springfield, Illinois where the children of Will Walling a contractor and surveyor James Gordon are playing while their fathers are meeting with none other than Abraham Lincoln at that time just a state legislator. Both would like to see a transcontinental railroad and Gordon is going to make good on it by going west and surveying the best route through the Rocky Mountains. But out west the surveyor is killed by hostile Indians led by a white man with only two fingers on his right hand. But the boy hides and is missed and grows up to be frontiersman George O'Brien.

Twenty years later in the midst of the great Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signs the legislation authorizing the building of such a railroad though the real work doesn't start until the war is over. By that time Will Walling is working on building the Union Pacific and his daughter has grown up to be Madge Bellamy. She's engaged to Cyril Chadwick another surveyor, but Chadwick has some mixed loyalties.

Those of you who saw the epic DeMille production Union Pacific will recognize from this point some of the same plot situations. No doubt Cecil B. DeMille borrowed quite a bit from The Iron Horse, but I will say DeMille wrecked his train during the Indian attack and it was a beauty. But Ford with all the extras involved could say that his was to use the cliché, a cast of thousands.

The real evil villain here just as Brian Donlevy was in Union Pacific is Fred Kohler. He's behind a lot of the scheming as he's a large landowner where the Cheyenne Indians seem to function as a personal army. Now that was a bit much to swallow. As was the fact that when the grown up George O'Brien first makes his appearance he is identified as a Pony Express rider. Everyone knows that the Pony Express was a year long phenomenon that the Civil War closed down and the telegraph and railroad put out of business permanently. But Ford was also interested in the poetry of the west rather than the facts.

Still the action of The Iron Horse holds up remarkably well today and the careers of both John Ford and George O'Brien were made with this film.

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.