User reviews

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.

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 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")

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.

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.

Very early John Ford western, don't bother looking for John Wayne here! "The Iron Horse" tells the story of the building of the railroad across America from the East to West coasts. Of course this is a movie so we also get a romance plot, a vengeance plot, hostile Indians, corrupt officials, jovial Irishmen, nasty Indians and so forth.

Although the tone of the film is mostly pretty patriotic and upbeat, there are several darker moments that hint at the corruption and greed in business as landowners attempt to influence the route of the railroad with bribes of women and money. Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" amongst many other later Westerns takes this theme further. Much of the work is done by Chinese immigrants, but they all seem pretty cheerful here!

In many areas the film is inevitably dated, particularly it's comic scenes and the aforementioned treatment of racial stereotypes. There are a few landscape shots and action scenes, but none as stunning or exciting as in Ford's slightly later "Stagecoach". The 2 hour plus running time is also a little too much. However, the film does succeed in creating an overwhelming sense of achievement in the creation of the railroad, although the sense that 'Civilisation' may actually be a threat, developed in later Westerns, is already apparent with the saloon that doubles as a court of law, and a drunken judge.

THE IRON HORSE (Fox, 1924), directed by John Ford, is an story set during the middle of the 19th century America about the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad. One of the very best examples of a lavish scale western produced during the silent era, said to be the answer to Paramount's earlier production of THE COVERED WAGON (1923), but most importantly, the first major project for Ford after nearly a decade in the director's chair to now gain the recognition he truly deserves.

The story opens with a prologue set in Springfield, Ill., 1853, revolving around Davy Brandon, first as a youngster (Winston Miller) with deep affection towards Miriam Marsh (Peggy Cartwright), his childhood sweetheart. Davy's father (James Gordon) is a surveyor who dreams about the crossing of the western wilderness, while Miriam's father, Thomas Marsh (William Walling), is a skeptic. However, one of the citizens, Abraham Lincoln (Charles Edward Bull), believes in this man's theory and knows he'll accomplish his means. Setting out to accompany his father on a mission to survey an appropriate route through the mountains for the coming railroad, Davy bids a tearful farewell to Miriam. During their westward journey, Davy, who is hidden away because of foreseen danger, witnesses the brutal killing of his father by a white man dressed up as an Indian whose only identification if the loss of a thumb and two fingers on his right hand. After burying his father, Davy is taken in by a passing scouting party. A decade later, 1862, Abraham Lincoln is president of the United States; Davy (George O'Brien) is a Pony Express rider out to fulfill his father's dream leading into the building of the Transcontinental Railroad; and Miriam (Madge Bellamy), now engaged to Peter Jesson (Cyril Chadwick), an Eastern surveyor working for her father actually working for Deroux (Fred Kohler), the richest landowner, who stands to profit if the railroad goes through instead of through the pass. After being reunited with Miriam, Jesson finds himself in stiff competition. The two men become bitter enemies, especially after Jesson's attempts in doing away with him. Matters become complex until the golden spike gets hammered into the rail on that historic day of 1869 as east meets west through the continental railroad.

In the supporting cast are Gladys Hulett (Ruby); Jack O'Brien (Dinny); three musketeer pals of J. Farrell MacDonald (Corporal Casey); Francis Powers (Sergeant Slattery); and James Welch (Private Schultz), as well as historical figures of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock and John Hay enacted by George Wagner, John Padjan and Stanhope Wheatcroft.

THE IRON HORSE (title indicating the locomotive train) plays like a D.W. Griffith production with prologue, historical figures, flashbacks and epilogue, and like a screen adaptation to an Edna Ferber novel telling its story through the passage of time, along with soap-opera ingredients (complicated love triangle), but no usual conclusions of central characters going through the white hair and wrinkles aging process. Overall, this is John Ford's storytelling, cliché as it may be, placing fictional characters against historic setting, along with the oft-told murder-mystery subplot of a son out to avenge his father's killer, a historical movie that's become an important part of cinema history. Ford, the future four time Academy Award winning director, with a handful of motion pictures to his credit, best known for westerns, would provide similar themes in his future film-making. As popular as THE IRON HORSE was back in 1924, it's amazing that Ford didn't attempt doing a remake, especially in 1939 when westerns reached it peak of popularity. It took Cecil B. DeMille to attempt a similar story with UNION PACIFIC (Paramount, 1939) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea. Like THE IRON HORSE, UNION PACIFIC, which tells its story in over two hours, features villains, Indian massacres and thousands of extras.

George O'Brien, a rugged actor, was an ideal choice for the role of Davy Brandon. Although he worked under Ford's direction numerous times in latter years, and showed his capability as a dramatic actor in F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE (1927), he never achieved major stardom. He did work steadily mostly in "B" westerns through the early 1950s. Co-star Madge Bellamy offers her typical heroine performance, caught between two men who vie for her affection, but is far from being a strong character. While the acting overall is satisfactory, from today's viewpoint, some heavy melodramatics as the method of fainting by youngster Davy after witnessing his father's massacre, or Bellamy's performance in general, might provoke some laughter. Scenes such as these can be overlooked by great location scenery as Monument Valley, a race against time and action scenes typically found in Ford westerns.

Television history to THE IRON HORSE began when it became one of the movies from the Paul Killiam collection to air on public television's 13-week series of "The Silent Years" (June-September 1975), hosted by Lillian Gish. In her profile about THE IRON HORSE (accompanied by an excellent piano score by William Perry), Gish talks about its location shooting in the Nevada desert, the use of 100 cooks to feed the huge cast, and 5,000 extras consisting of 3,000 railway workers, 1,000 Chinese laborers, many horses and steers. Decades later, THE IRON HORSE made it to the American Movie Classics (1997-1999) and Turner Classic Movies (TCM premiere December 9, 2007 ) accompanied by orchestral score with 15 minutes of additional footage as opposed to the 119 minutes presented on both "The Silent Years," and the Western Channel in 2001. Distributed to home video Critic's Choice in 1997, availability on DVD came a decade later.

THE IRON HORSE may not be historically accurate as promised through its opening inter-titles, but it's sure an ambitious John Ford production to still be entertaining today. (****)

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.

"The Iron Horse" is the first trans-American railway system; the story of its construction is told in this film. Chief among the other plot lines is the love story featuring hero George O'Brien (as Davy Brandon) and heroine Madge Bellamy (as Miriam Marsh). Villainous Cyril Chadwick (as Peter Jesson) comes between them. Will Mr. O'Brien and Ms. Bellamy come together? Will the Central Pacific railroad and the Union Pacific railroad hook up? Only time will tell…

This film takes a long, long time to pick up steam. Star O'Brien (and many regular cast members) appear only after a prolonged prologue. Some of the supporting cast are dispensable, like the unfunny "three musketeers". Fortunately, "The Iron Horse" is expertly directed by John Ford; and, lead actor O'Brien is very appealing.

****** The Iron Horse (8/28/24) John Ford ~ George O'Brien, Madge Bellamy, Charles Edward Bull, Cyril Chadwick

Having at one time been the Southern Pacific Trainmaster for the territory of the eastern half of the predecessor Central Pacific, I have done extensive research on the old CPRR, between Montello NV and Lovelock NV.

Although not a "railfan" nor a "steam fan", I am an amateur historian.

John Ford's work in "The Iron Horse" was absolutely brilliant. He brought to the screen the real feeling of genuineness with the way the original "Chinaman's railroad" (as many local historians called it) was constructed, to the screen with absolute realism.

My father and his brother were working for Universal at the time this was made.

I'm a real fan of John Ford, and would rank this among his "most technically correct" film accomplishments, and I know that he always strove for realism.

Walter J Gould

THE IRON HORSE is a plot heavy western with what appears to be an authentic historical background, well photographed in crisp B&W photography that is not as primitive as one might expect from a film made in 1924. It bustles with excitement whenever any action scenes are taking place, accompanied by a "silent" music score that actually fits the story and never becomes tiresome.

GEORGE O'BRIEN has the lead but doesn't enter the film until at least fifty minutes is taken up with a prologue involving old Abe Lincoln himself and the friendship of two children who are soon separated but destined to meet again midway through the story when they're adults. The girl is played as a young woman by MADGE BELLAMY. She and O'Brien become romantically attached although she's now the fiancé of one of the villains of the piece. There's also a subplot involving the man who killed O'Brien's father, Bauman (FRED KOHLER), who is a white man joining the Indians for attacks on the "iron horse".

Some of the acting is strictly silent film technique and there's the usual John Ford inclusion of comedy relief from actors like J. FARRELL MacDONALD, long stretches of captioned "talk" for scenes that run too long with exposition, but decent work from O'Brien and Bellamy as the leads.

It's pioneering in the Ford mold, obviously a film that employed a huge cast to portray the building of the Union Pacific railway to the west, telling a fictional story of romance and danger with authority.

Worth viewing, although at two hours and ten minutes it can sometimes try your patience. All the hard work that went into the making of the film is evident throughout.

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.

I've been going back and forth between The Iron Horse and The Thief of bagdad comparing them not because they have much in common but because they're both epic's i really like and admit aren't nearly as good as their reputation would suggest.

What's interesting to me in this comparison is that they suffer from mutually exclusive problems typical for the films of the period (both came out in 1924) and they could've learned a lot from one another.

The sets in thief of bagdad, like many films of the time (even those praised for their set design) have this fake "cardboard box" look.you know, the flat walls and pillars, the plastic steels and swords, the curtain ocean, not to mention motionless monsters held up by easily observable wires. Realism doesn't matter but you should maintain some level of believability and having walls so flat and smooth you'd think they're cleaned by razors, next to normal actors doesn't work like it'd If everything was flat like in an animation.

Why The Iron Horse is such an achievement is exactly because it maintains an extremely high level of believability and realism for the whole duration (other than the first 15 minutes). It's hard to doubt anything in the film when just watching people make railroads is so enjoyable and believable even when you should be doubting what's happening.

What it suffers from is the structure and pacing of the story, once you stop feeling immersed and think about the story, you realize it's filled with irrelevant stuff (the Lincoln scenes would be an easy example) and when the film ends, you might have some appreciation for the history and the labor of workers that connected east and west but you'll have none for the characters, the romance, the revenge subplot and ... that just take you out of the experience.

On the hand in The thief of bagdad, watching fairbanks' character alone is a joy. The film is filled with interesting cultures and curios with a story so tight i couldn't believe it was around 160 minutes when i first watched it. The film simply provides a descent story with effective storytelling while still providing enough for the viewer to appreciate the history of Baghdad as well.

I've also noticed that it seems like the older the picture, the more knowledgeable it is about other cultures, there are many things in this film, even in the title cards, that show the creators actually researched/knew about the setting and that they at least looked up some arabic/persian books. This might sound counterintuitive in the age of "diversity" and "inclusion" but what i've seen is that the diverse characters of modern films are only diverse cosmetically, they don't actually possess diverse identities (cultures,beliefs,ideologies,religions) that older films include.

In conclusion, I'd recommend both of these for those interested in history, even hollywood history but i don't see how others would enjoy them.

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.

John Ford's silent western about the building of the transcontinental railroad. It's the movie that put Ford on the map, so to speak, and helped pave the way for many epic westerns to follow. George O'Brien stars as a man who works to realize his father's dream of a railroad that connects east to west. Between this and fighting Indians, he barely finds time to romance Madge Bellamy. It's a beautiful-looking film, with a praiseworthy amount of work put into it. My favorite scenes were all related to the trains and railroad construction. The effort to make these scenes are realistic as possible is very impressive. The scope of it all, with the history, the great scenery, the thousands of extras, the wonderful action scenes -- it's just a damn fine piece of work from a director who would become one of the all-time greats. Really that road for Ford starts here. One final note: Winston Miller, the child actor who played the younger version of O'Brien's character, would go on to become a screenwriter and producer. One of the scripts he co-wrote was John Ford's classic My Darling Clementine.

I remember seeing this, done with a real blue tint if I remember right. J. Farrell McDonald was fun-the bald guy who looks like William Frawley? He shows up as a bartender in John Ford's lator 'My Darling Clementine' '46, pretty much looking the same way.

This was pure '20's Western stuff-having Buffalo Bill AND Wild Bill together(can't tell'em apart here well either...), and Indian attack or three, Lincoln on hand for Americana, some good stuff with buffalo hunting and etc.

George O'brien as the hero is alright too. He went on to play the same kinds of rolls as Tim Holt and Bob Steele did for ages.

This holds up well, is kind of long but involving, and NO, the music score is NOT hokey or out of place. Worked real well the two times I have sat through this film, actually.

*** outta ****, a semi-forgetten classic.

William Fox, head of Fox Films Corporation, was drooling over the box office receipts of his competitor, Paramount Pictures' recent western, 1923's 'The Covered Wagon.' He saw gold in them thar' hills and wanted to duplicate its success. His studio had in its employ a young director, John Ford. He recently changed his first name from Jack and had handled dozens of short Westerns, but he was never in charge of big-budgeted features. Fox took an intuitive gamble to assign Ford for his studio's proposed epic western, which was replacing covered wagons for trains. The mega-movie planned to use the framework of the United States' first transcontinental train construction as a base to show a greedy landowner's dishonest persuasion to route the tracks to his property instead of a shorter, less costly route.

Ford, who produced over 50 low-budgeted westerns, emerged from the August 1924 "The Iron Horse" as a new front-ranked director for larger-scale feature films. Despite the production costing much more than Fox had envisioned, Ford's reputation as a dependable deliverer of exciting motion pictures was solidified by "The Iron Horse's" strong box office returns. It became the year's seventh highest ticket sales film in 1924.

The production of "The Iron Horse" was not a walk in the park by any means. Working from a script with a number of holes in it, 29-year-old Ford had to fill in the blanks every night for the next day's shoot. Filming in the desert of Nevada near Reno in January posed problems with the cold and snow. The support structure as well as the logistics of handling hundreds of extras as rail workers, Indians, cavalry soldiers, and townspeople, along with herds of buffalo, horses and cattle in the remote location under extreme conditions tested the patience of the young director. Besides some infighting with his younger brother Eddie and some difficult actors, Ford emerged with some stunning footage. Sitting comfortably in his New York City office, Fox looked at the expense ledger Ford was submitting by the week and demanded to see some of the 'rushes' from the remote Nevada site. When the reels arrived, Fox's assistant asked if they should pull Ford for a more experienced director. After seeing the raw footage, Fox said he was pleased with the results and allowed Ford to continue.

The finished product of "The Iron Horse" justifies Fox's assessment. The picture became the blueprint for future Ford films in look and in structure. The director was known to fill the frame with activity: a simple conversation isn't isolated between conversationists. He places people and action in his backgrounds to juice up the visuals. During the number of fight scenes, Ford puts the viewer in the middle of the action. In one case he dug a hole in the ground for his cameraman and camera, covered the opening with planks so onrushing Indians on horseback appear to trample on top of the audience.

Ford is also known as a landscape director, framing his shots in a series of wide panoramas to take advantage of the specular background scenery. When a young Steven Spielberg, who was interning in the same film studio as the aging Ford was working at, popped into the director's office for some sage advice. Ford pointed to two photographs hanging in his office showing two different landscape horizons. "When you know why the horizon goes at the top of the frame or the bottom of a frame, then you're a director," Ford asserted. Scenes from "The Iron Horse," capturing varying desert and mountainous landscapes with Indians riding, are perfect examples on what the director meant in adjusting several camera angles to dramatize upcoming carnage.

"The Iron Horse" also offers a John Ford trademark of inserting levity in the middle of the most dire and serious situations. Corporal Casey (J. Farrell McDonald) leads a trio of Army soldiers whose comedy antics runs counter to the more deliberate actors such as George O'Brien, in his first major role. O'Brien's long road to Hollywood began after his discharge from the Marines when he saw action in the frontlines as a stretcher bearer. His ambition was always to be a cameraman in Hollywood. To get his foot in the door, his muscular frame was ideal for a stuntman and bit parts, especially in Westerns. Ford selected him as an ideal hero of the director's first major movie.

There's something evidently different about this film from Ford's previous surviving feature films, something from the very beginning. It's bigger and grander in feel from its opening scene than anything he had made up to this point, and that feeling continues through its runtime as The Iron Horse manages, not always the most gracefully, to tell a very largely scoped story with a strongly intimate human story at the foreground. This is the sort of stuff that Hollywood really became known for, presaged by D. W. Griffith.

This epic story includes the transcontinental railroad, Cheyenne warriors, Pawnee warriors, moving an entire community by rail every few miles to keep up with the tracks, nascent frontier justice, revenge, barroom brawls, romance, and even Abraham Lincoln. The story begins in Springfield, Illinois as Brandon, a dreamer who imagines a country united by a railroad from east to west, packs up his things and takes his young son, Davy, out West. Seeing them off is the young lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, who takes the dream to heart and signs the bill, as president in the middle of the Civil War, to fund the project. Brandon, though, is killed by a two-fingered bandit leading a group of Cheyenne warriors, Davy being saved by a group of frontiersmen later on.

Years pass, and work has started and progressed on the railroad. The man in charge of the Union Pacific Railroad Company is Thomas Marsh (Will Walling), another man from Springfield, whose daughter, Miriam (Madge Bellamy) is engaged to Thomas' chief engineer Peter Jesson (Cyril Chadwick) despite her childhood promise to Davy that they would see each other again. The first hour or so of the film is probably the weakest, never bad, but always feeling like a series of short films about separate, but perhaps related, characters. They all manage to come together in the end, though.

Along at the front of the work is the mysterious Deroux (Fred Kohler) who wants to keep the path of the railroad on his own land instead of using any other shorter route that could cut off two-hundred miles from the work. In walks the adult Davy (George O'Brien). Rugged after growing up in the wilds, he ends up in the railroad camp while on the run from some Cheyenne warriors where he tells Thomas of the shorter route through a ravine that his father had shown him just before his untimely death. Deroux, though, has convinced Jesson to kill Davy on the trip out, to prevent the confirmation of the information from ever reaching Marsh. Jesson mucks it up, cutting Davy's rope while down in the ravine, a fall that Davy miraculously survives. Jesson thinks that Davy is dead, and Davy thinks it was just an accident. He shows back up to camp some days later, confused because the track is bending southward instead of towards the ravine, and things begin to bubble up to the surface.

Davy, dedicated to his puppy dog love of the girl he knew back in Springfield, does what he can to gallantly avoid an actual confrontation with the man who tried to kill him, but when Jesson fires a pistol at him, the fight can't be avoided. Davy wins, but he broke his word to Miriam. As work continues and these feelings fester, Deroux, frustrated at Jesson's failure to prevent the return of Davy, reveals his true self to the audience by returning to the Chayenne and showing us his two-fingered right hand. He is the man who killed Davy's father, and he is going to use his Cheyenne connections to attack the train construction. Davy manages to get away with the engine, returning to the community in time to bring in the men with guns and fight them off, leaving him with a final opportunity to face off with Deroux one on one. Good guys win, of course.

Then, the movie makes an interesting turn. Davy decides to leave the Union Pacific to join the Central Pacific, and the final twenty minutes or so are the race between the two to reach the end of the line, giving us a view of the west to east side of the construction. It's a steadily building sequence that triumphantly ends in the unification of both ends with Davy meeting his old pals and Miriam again.

It's straightforward storytelling with great skill and energy by Ford. More than twice as long as his longest previous film, The Iron Horse is grand old Hollywood entertainment, focusing on character, giving them time to breathe and feel real, while putting them into exciting and thrilling situations, this time rooted firmly in America's past. The romance is well executed with two likeable leads. The action is fast, clear, and exciting. The story itself is interesting and never gets bogged down in details. Aside from the feeling of short films that permeates the film's first half, the only other complaint I have is that there are some side characters that get a bit too much attention, in particular a trio of railway workers, one Irish, one Italian, and the other born in America, and some of their comedic business, such as when one of them has to go to the dentist at the new town because of a sore tooth. It kind of just sticks out as an unnecessary bit of business, though they do have, overall, a positive impact on the feeling of the film, especially their final moment where one breaks a bottle of champagne on one of the engines meeting in the middle, and another bemoans the waste of alcohol by wiping his finger over the broken inside and licking his finger, angry that he lost out on a drink so delicious.

Still, this is an imperfect but wonderful entertainment that I found a joy to watch.