THE IRON HORSE (1924) Seen on DVD John Ford had already directed 50 films by the time he took on the epic project THE IRON HORSE. None of those prior films were likely portents of just how masterfully he could handle a large-scale epic, as virtually all of them had been small pictures devoid of grandiose intent. THE IRON HORSE was something else indeed, a monumental production involving thousands of people, recapitulating one of the great triumphs of the new industrial age, and the film that put Ford on the map as one of Hollywood’s most formidable directors. The story of the transcontinental railroad is at least vaguely familiar to anyone who knows even a little about 19th century American history, and it has been depicted more than once in the movies. But Ford’s 1924 silent endeavor focuses closely to the story of the railroad, with the emotional relationships of its characters sublimated to the historical pageant being depicted. That might sound like a recipe for dullness, but it is Ford’s skill in execution that makes it anything but dull. Historical films of the silent era often made much of the verisimilitude and authenticity of their production, noting that certain scenes or props or sets were “exactly reproduced” from historical evidence, with that notation often coming in the midst of a scene. THE IRON HORSE makes such claims, too, though it comes closer to living up to those claims than some films. (The film does inaccurately claim that the two locomotives used in the climactic joining of the railroads in Utah are the actual locomotives from the real-life event, but this seems to be the only out-and-out failure of claimed authenticity.) Ford makes THE IRON HORSE not only a drama of people and their need to progress and expand and explore, but also something near a documentary on how they did so. There are long scenes of railroad building that are not remotely dull, but fascinatingly informative. Ford uses location, weather, and topography to make tedious labors seem wildly dramatic. His eye for composition and setting was clearly well developed by this time, though at 29, he had little of the reputation he would soon achieve for his visual and thematic mastery. George O’Brien, a 24-year-old athlete and World War I veteran who had barely scratched the surface of Hollywood, was picked out of this obscurity by Ford to play the lead character, Davy Brandon, the scout for the westward-bound railroad constructors. O’Brien doesn’t appear in the film for nearly three-quarters of the first hour, though we’ve seen young Davy as a boy and witnessed the murder of his father by a two-fingered Indian. Davy, now a man, joins the railroad partly out of loyalty to his father’s dream of surveying a path joining the two sides of the nation. He faces opposition from construction engineer Jesson (Cyril Chadwick), who not only is engaged to Davy’s childhood sweetheart Miriam (Madge Bellamy), but is also in cahoots with a murderous landowner named Bauman (Fred Kohler), who wants the railroad redirected through land he owns for greedy purposes. The drama (or melodrama) involving Davy, Miriam, and the villainous Jesson and Bauman is functional and involving, but Ford never lets it supersede the real story he’s telling, the one he would tell many times in his career in one form or another – the building of the United States of America. Never in the course of the film do we lose sight of the fact that something far transcending romantic or nefarious drama is at stake, and Ford’s use of vast landscapes and massive numbers of people in his shots reinforces that transcendent idea. THE IRON HORSE is remarkably modern in its execution and experiencing it is a remarkably modern-feeling experience. It has little or none of the staid, stagnant quality some people associate (largely inaccurately) with silent film, and it retains the excitement it first engendered 90 years ago. While Ford’s real masterpieces would come later, THE IRON HORSE pulls a great deal of the freight that allowed those later masterpieces to be made. It showed the world that a superb young filmmaker had arrived and that stopping him would be like stopping a locomotive. imdb/title/tt0015016/combined
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:14:20 +0000
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