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MovieMail's Review
Ford's great western about spanning the continent by railroad, The Iron Horse's mix of macho patriotism and rugged poetry confirmed his mastery of location shooting, says David Parkinson.
The 1924 press book for John Ford’s seminal silent Western made great play of statistics: 10,000 Texas steers, 2,800 horses, 1,300 buffalo, 3,000 railway workers, 1,000 Chinese labourers and 800 Pawnee, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians were involved in the making of the 31 year-old’s fifty-third directorial outing.
The storyline is pure melodrama, but none the worse for that – George O’Brien’s Pony Express rider bids to avenge his father’s murder and help his childhood sweetheart’s father fulfil Abraham Lincoln’s ambition to link the Central and Union Pacific railroads. Ford leavens this with plenty of raucous humour and action sequences that were notable for their audacious stuntwork.
Despite an intertitle claiming this ‘pictorial history of the building of the first American transcontinental railroad’ to be ‘accurate and faithful in every particular of fact and atmosphere’, this is as fanciful a recreation as DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had been nine years earlier.
Cinema had come a long way in the intervening period, but the concept of political correctness had not and Ford’s depiction of the diverse ethnic groups laying and endangering the tracks is as unenlightened in this paean to post-Civil War reunification as Griffith’s epochal treatise on reconstruction had been in its attitude to African-Americans. However, with Ford and cinematographer George Schneiderman making evocative use of the majestic wilderness, this answer to James Cruze’s Manifest Destiny masterpiece The Covered Wagon (1923) is every bit as epic.
Despite the acclaim of contemporary critics, Ford only rarely returned to the genre before he changed it forever with Stagecoach (1939). However, O’Brien’s principled man of action anticipates the characters later played in Ford Westerns by John Wayne and Henry Fonda, while J. Farrell MacDonald’s Irish corporal is a clear kinsman of the roguish supports taken by Victor McLaglen. Moreover, this distinctive mix of macho patriotism and rugged poetry confirmed Ford’s mastery of location shooting and established the brand of sentimental mythologising that eventually became his trademark.
Original, US, 150-minute version of the film, accompanied by a 2007 score by Christopher Caliendo
Shorter, UK, 133-minute version of the film (which includes alternate takes), accompanied by an adaptation of the Caliendo score
Audio commentary for the UK version of the film by scholar Robert Birchard
New and exclusive 30-minute video essay by Tag Gallagher, author of John Ford: The Man and His Films
A lengthy illustrated booklet containing vintage press and publicity material, and more!.
Film Description
The first smash hit in the career of one of Hollywood's greatest and most enduringly popular directors, The Iron Horse was one of the great blockbusters of Hollywood's silent era, with over 6,000 extras at work on the film. It has been called the grandfather of all Westerns.
Young Davy Brandon accompanies his father westward to realise the elder's dream of a railroad bridging the continent. Years after his father's murder and scalping by a two-fingered Cheyenne half-breed, the adult David (played by George O'Brien, three years before his lead role in Sunrise, here in the first of ten films he made with Ford) joins in the effort to lay track and accommodate 'the iron horse'.
With its expressive compositional prowess, incredible stunt work and generous humour, The Iron Horse anticipates the universe that Ford would go on to calibrate perfectly in his greatest works.
Ford directed The Iron Horse, his first great box office success and the epic silent Western, when he was 30. Its theme of enterprise and achievement, its open-air loc... more >
Ford directed The Iron Horse, his first great box office success and the epic silent Western, when he was 30. Its theme of enterprise and achievement, its open-air locations and setting in a vigorous and pioneering past proved just the subject to stimulate the young director’s talent. Made as Fox’s response to Paramount’s 1923 The Covered Wagon, the sheer scale of the film surpassed all other Westerns of the silent era, and established Ford as one of the leading directors in the industry.
The Iron Horse combines a conventional tale of double-dealing, vengeance and romance with a poetic sense of history, and an epic theme – uniting a nation by building a transcontinental railroad, and a great man’s dream realized by the courage, skill and labour of ordinary folk. Taking in huge swathes of American history – the Civil War, Lincoln’s Presidency, westward expansion, the Indian wars, Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok – Ford succeeds in combining the epic and the intimate, with a wealth of human detail. By the time The Iron Horse was made, what were to become familiar Fordian motifs - broad comedy, drinking and saloon brawls, ethnic rivalry – were firmly established, and his breathtaking visual style – camera usually stationary, actors carefully choreographed around it, use of shadow, extreme long shots, and shots framed by doorways - highly developed.
