The Iron Horse, 1924

1923s The Covered Wagon proved a lucrative success for Paramount, so the following year Fox Film Corporation launched their version--John Ford's The Iron Horse. Although Ford had made dozens of movies by this point, the scale and scope of the project, which has been called The Grandfather of the Epic Western and was in instant hit, launched him into directorial stardom.

Mission: according to our first True Grit discussion, every Western needs a mission. In this case, it's the completion of the first transcontinental railroad--the marriage of the Union and Central Pacific railroads--which occurs in its final stages in 1869.

Plot: there's a pretty tricky stretch of terrain in the western part of our country called The Rocky Mountains. While scoping out a passage through the mountains, a father and son team are confronted by Cheyenne Indians, and the father is killed. Also present was an Anglo, allied to the Cheyenne, sporting only two fingers on his hand.
The boy escapes, grows up, becomes our hero, and is played by the dreamy George O'Brien.

You don't need a license for those guns in the West!

Ford introduces the ultimate destructive power of the Love Triangle early on with the arrival of Davy's childhood sweetheart (they grew up in Springfield, Illinois--right next door to Lincoln!), Miriam Marsh (played by Madge Bellamy) and her weaselly, weaselly fiance/engineer. Did I mention her father owns the railroad?
The weaselly, weaselly fiance/engineer falls in with a bad crowd, as many weasels do, led by--could you ever guess it?--an equally weaselly man with only two fingers on one hand.
Davy's mission becomes even more fine-tuned: find the pass, fight off the Indians and baddies, connect the two railroads at Promontory Point in Utah (which looks suspiciously like the east side of the Sierras), then, and only then, plant a big smacker on the lips of his childhood sweetie. Along the way we are introduced to such characters as Abraham Lincoln (played by Charles Edward Bull) and Buffalo Bill Cody (George Waggner).

William Fredrick "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917)

Significance: Ford's Westerns are known not just for their impressive visuals and story lines, but for their historical accuracy and social commentary. The Iron Horse uses the completion of the railroad, in a sense the end of the Frontier Era and beginning of the commercial conquest of the interior, to show how civilization trumps wilderness.
Ford's films are also notable for their obsessive attention to detail. He purchased herds of over 10,000 head of cattle, 1,300 buffalo, and even found the original locomotives Jupiter and The 116 for the final scenes depicting the merger of the rail lines.
The social criticism seems to swing in favor of the workers over the capitalists, who are depicted as sleazy and unscrupulous. Towns are particularly makeshift in this production, as workers build them, then abandon them as they move on. Stragglers are left behind, suffering. Always careful to point out the role of the immigrants in westward expansion, Ford shows community and camaraderie within the different ethnic groups, especially the Chinese and Irish.


Camaraderie

In The Iron Horse, Ford introduces us to such iconic themes as the saloon-turned-courthouse and the drunken judge. Both comments on how the west was won.

Discussion: our class discussion looked at roles of women, who are divided into the two basic categories of madonna or, um, not discriminate. The not discriminate women were tough and admirable, but doomed to fall short on the American Dream. Women were often seen alongside cattle in the film, but we did see them fighting alongside the men when it was necessary. We also looked at some of the homoerotic tones in the film, which may have been a product of the period and the silent medium (gestures exaggerated), but may have also been a comment on westward expansion.

The immigrant communities were of particular interest, and were depicted heroically--Irish, Chinese, and the soldiers of the American Calvary--though, through a contemporary lens we know that race and class issues were rampant during this period. Contemporary westerns tend to be more fair in their portrayals of injustice, but it is possible Ford was making a statement about the mythologizing of the American West, that, even as it was happening, it was being turned into Hollywood gold.

John Ford (1894-1973)