The Iron Horse ***** (1924, George O’Brien, Madge Bellamy, Charles Edward Bull) – Classic Movie Review 2503

This splendid 1924 classic silent Western from the Fox Film Company and the already expert young director John Ford virtually invented the vocabulary of the genre. The characters’ lives are set against the background of a romanticised idea of the building of the first trans-America railway. Ford mythologises the real story, and as usual, takes a historical subject but prefers the fantasy and ‘prints the myth’.

The main plotline is about surveyor Dave Brandon (played by George O’Brien) loving his boss (Will Walling)’s daughter Miriam Marsh (Madge Bellamy) and fighting his wicked rival Bauman (Fred Kohler). The simple and sweet romance is balanced by equally simple and sweet comedy from J Farrell MacDonald, Francis Powers and James Welch as the ‘three musketeers’, Corporal Casey, Sergeant Slattery and Private Mackay, three ex-Civil War soldiers working on the railroad.

Ford is working at the peak of his powers on a vast canvas with a huge cast, also including Charles Edward Bull, Cyril Chadwick, Gladys Hulette, James Marcus, Walter Rogers, George Waggner (Buffalo Bill), Jack Padjan (Wild Bill Hickok) and Charles O’Malley.

The sequence when the two halves of the railway meet is truly moving. It’s really the big thrill moment of the film when it culminates with the history-making scene of the two locomotives meeting Promontory Summit during the Golden Spike ceremony commemorating the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad on May 10 1869.

A title notes that the two original locomotives from 1869 event are used in the film, but this is not true as the Jupiter and Union Pacific Locomotive 119 had been scrapped and the ones in the film are not the two original engines. The film is dedicated to George Stephenson the father of the railway locomotive.

Beautifully restored in 1994 as a Channel 4 Silent, with a rousing new score by Carl Davis, it still entertains and delights audiences, now finally in a version that’s easy and a thrill for anyone to get into it.

Among the extras used in the Central Pacific sequences were Chinese retired Central Pacific Railroad employees playing the coolies working on the railroad. 

Charles Edward Bull was a real-life judge working for the Justice of the Peace in Reno, Nevada, but became better known for his impersonation of Abraham Lincoln in this and the 1927 melodrama The Heart of Maryland.

George O’Brien also appeared in Sunrise (1927) and Ford ‘s Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and his last film appearance was in Ford’s 1964 Cheyenne Autumn.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2503

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