Now if any of you are thinking that silent movies are filled with over-emoting heroines and moustache-twirling villains, well think again. At least in the case of John Ford it's not true. Viewers may be surprised at how graceful many of the performances are. And there's a genuine magic and beauty to these images that are nearly a hundred years old. There's something about seeing the medium when it was young that's exciting. Even though Ford had made dozens of silent films before 1924, you sense that he is still experimenting with the medium and trying to push its boundaries. The Iron Horse was Ford's most ambitious Western up until that time and it challenged the simple Western formulas of the day.
The Iron Horse (Twenieth Century Fox)
For The Iron Horse , Ford wanted to tell the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad, an epic project that was completed in 1869. It's a story that celebrates men who dared to dream, a president who had a vision for the future and the workers who built the railway. It's a film brimming with a patriotic sense of pride about what America could accomplish, and about winning the West by linking the two coasts by rail. The joining together of the two railways also serves as a metaphor for bridging the divide caused by the Civil War, bringing men--many former soldiers--from both the North and the South together to work on the railroad. Ford even weaves a romance through his historical epic and the young lovers only come together when the railroad itself is joined.
The film mixes the epic with the intimate. So we have wide shots of the land and of the tracks being laid but we also have time to enjoy a couple of kids playing in the snow. Watching the film is like taking a journey back in time. Yet despite the fact that it's set in the past, it's a film that celebrates progress--but it's progress at a cost. There's a bit of irony in the fact that Ford's first big Western focuses on an event that in a certain respect brought the frontier age to en end. The Iron Horse suggests a struggle with dreamers and workers on one side, and money-men and greedy capitalists on the other. Ford sides with the men who have a vision of joining the East and the West through the railroad, and with the men (many of them Irish in the film) who worked on the railroad. And although you can't call the film politically correct in its depiction of the Native Americans and the Chinese, Ford does afford them more dignity than you'd expect in a film from the 1920s. Ford even suggests that part of the cost of progress is that it allowed the white man to further intrude on the Native Americans' land.
Lovers joined by the rails. (Twentieth Century Fox)
Ford's The Iron Horse does not serve up a completely accurate historical account of the time but it definitely conveys the scope of the project and a sense of the times. The film diverts from its main story to touch on issues of the Civil War, Lincoln's presidency and the Indian Wars, and it includes such notable figures as Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok. It also includes quite a bit of railroad history, including the use of the real Jupiter and 116 locomotives, the ones that appear meeting head to head in the famous photograph of the joining of the tracks at Promontory Point, Utah.
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , someone states: "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Ford's films have always been about the give and take, push and pull between the facts and the legend. His films tend to show how truth mutates into myth. In the case of The Iron Horse, we get a sense of both. There's grit to some of the images of working on the track but there's also an epic sweep to the story and admiration for the people who dared to dream that a transcontinental railway could be a reality.
Although Ford is not yet at the peak of his artistic powers in The Iron Horse , the film is still immensely entertaining and fascinating as a glimpse of the early Ford. There are some marvelous sequences such as an Indian attack played out mostly through shadows on the rail cars. When the Indians try to stop the train at one point, we sense the futility of their efforts to stop the white man's advancement. There's also a shot of a huge team of horses trying to pull a locomotive up a hill. The shot reminds us of another film about a dreamer, Werner Herzogs Fitzcarraldo , and a boat that workers try to bring over a hill. The camaraderie and humor that develops among the supporting characters reminds one of the great ensemble of actors he would later assemble. There's also a very human Abraham Lincoln--a character that would appear again in Ford's films.
The Iron Horse (unrated but suitable for all audiences) is a wonderful piece of cinematic history and it's a pleasure to be able to see it on a big screen. Fox has done an amazing job cleaning up the image and restoring all the title cards. It's nice to see a studio dig this far back into their vaults to come up with a rare gem like this. The new score by composer Christopher Caliendo (who also did the re-scoring of Major Dundee ) is rousing and evocative. It resists using strains of familiar songs like "We've Been Working on the Railway," and instead invests the film with a grandeur that complements the action without pulling you out of the story.
Caliendo will be available for Q&A after the film. In addition, reprints of the films program and poster along with a box set of Ford DVDs will be raffled off at the screening.
Companion viewing: Union Pacific, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The General
