The History of John Ford: The Iron Horse (1924)

When Orson Welles was asked what movies he studied before embarking on directing Citizen Kane he replied, "I studied the Old Masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." 

Running parallel with our series about Akira Kurosawa ("Walking Kurosawa's Road"), we're running a series of pieces about the closest thing America has to Kurosawa in artistry—director John Ford. Ford rarely made films set in the present day, but (usually) made them about the past...and about America's past, specifically (when he wasn't fulfilling a passion for his Irish roots). 

 In "The History of John Ford" we'll be gazing fondly at the work of this American Master, who started in the Silent Era, learning his craft, refining his director's eye, and continuing to work deep into the 1960's (and his 70's) to produce the greatest body of work of any American "picture-maker," America's storied film-maker, the irascible, painterly, domineering, sentimental puzzle that was John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) "Accurate and faithful in every particular of fact and atmosphere is this pictorial history of the building of the first transcontinental railroad" says the opening title card of The Iron Horse, John Ford's epic 2 1/2 hour silent epic about the building of the first transcontinental railroad. Well, that might be a stretch, but it certainly "becomes" truth, so "cut...print" this legend that manages to cram a large swath of American history into its story of cowboys, Indians, cattle-drives, the Pony Express, murder, ethnic conflicts, ethnics, situational ethics, love lost and found, men (lost and found), the transitory nature of railroad towns, a nice little bar-room brawl, and the consideration of what passed as frontier justice, as well as appearances by Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok and Abraham Lincoln. That's a lot of track to put down and Ford and his writers Charles Kenyon and John Russell manage to link it all with the stories of a disparate group of people all linked together to try to unite the country after its fractious Civil War.

They just have to keep from killing each other first.

It starts with a man and a dream. David Brandom (James Gordon) is commiserating with two of his friends in Springfield, Illinois, contractor Thomas Marsh (Will Walling) and Abraham Lincoln (Charles Edward Bull) as he prepares a journey West with his son to survey a better path across the U.S. for a future rail transportation system than the Indian trail that is the expected route.

Three months later, Brandom finds a pass that will cut the trip a good two hundred miles, but before he can alert anyone to the fact, he is attacked and killed by a raiding party of Cherokees, and killed by a white renegade who only has two fingers on his right hand. Davey Jr., hiding from the attack is left alive and is found by trappers.

Cut to June, 1862 and now-President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill to build two railways, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, simultaneously to meet mid-way and construction, forming a continuous route from East to West, despite protests from the military not to divert funds from the Civil War. To watch the signing is contractor Marsh as well as his daughter Miriam (Madge Bellamy)—who had been sweet on young Davey in their youth, but is now engaged to her father's engineer, Jesson (Cyril Chadwick).

The project gets underway, but soon runs into difficulty, both internally and externally. Cheyenne warrior attacks plague the construction (led by frequent Ford actor Chief John Big Tree), disrupting payrolls and killing workers, requiring law enforcement to be constantly on-site. Those attacks could be at the instigation of a land-owner, Deroux (Fred Kohler), who wants the train to be built on his holdings—and he's aided by the fact that Jesson is taking bribes to maintain Deroux's interests over Marsh's'. It puts the project in a financial bind, forcing Marsh to start looking for a shorter, more efficient route that over Jesson and Deroux's objections. 

In the nick of time reappears young Davey (George O'Brien) who encounters the train while delivering mail via the Pony Express. Davey re-unites with Marsh, who tells him of the troubles he's having, and Davey tells him of the pass he and his father discovered on their doomed surveying expedition all those many years ago. Marsh tasks Davey to re-trace the steps of the trip as the discovery may save the project from ruin.

But, Davey can't go alone. Jesson insists on going to verify the viability of the route. This is bad news for Davey, who's suspicious of the engineer, not only because he distrusts him on first sight, but also as he's engaged to Miriam, his boyhood love. He has good reason to distrust Jesson, as the crooked engineer has been tasked by Deroux to kill Davey and scuttle any plans to scuttle the route that would not benefit him.

Sure enough, once they find the fabled pass, while Davey starts to descend the side of the bluff to check conditions of the passage, Jesson cuts his rope, sending the young man tumbling into the valley. Without so much as a backward glance, Jesson goes back to Marsh to report the route is unsafe, Davey having been killed in a typical rock-fall.

Of course, he hasn't. That wouldn't be right. And how Davey gets back to the train is just one of the many sub-plots and incidences in Ford's massive epic—it would have been called a 15-reeler in its day (10 minutes a reel). And those reels are jammed with happenstance. Despite the plight of Davey, there's so much going on because...well, building a locomotive track across virginal country is a complicated thing...because of the remoteness and the man-hours needed and the supplies needed to feed and house those producers of man-hours, and that's fine if everybody agrees it's a good idea. If they don't, that's drama. And The Iron Horse carries a lot of drama.

So, yeah, there's all that stuff in the film I listed in the first paragraph of the post-proper. Davey's is just one story, but his story is contained in the entire movie, even pre-dating the building of the railroad. There's a call-back to the earlier murder of Davey's father, the perpetrator being one of the dramatis personæ in the latter-day proceedings. To anyone who's experienced the bubble-universe of movies, it won't be any surprise who the scoundrel is (actions beget character), despite that individual's ability to cross cultures.

As insular as the story is, it does take advantage of the scope inherent in such a massive project as the transcontinental railroad, an attempt by settlers to unite both shores of the continent and create a line between such far-flung expanses and peoples. Ford's histories of the U.S. are all about world-building, the particulars of the individuals finding common ground, despite their differences, and making a better world for themselves through the efforts of the dedicated and despite the desires of the self-interested. Community is all in Ford's films, even in such early efforts as this silent epic that stretched the boundaries of subject matter, location filming, and the art of film-making.

It's an epic tale of an epic task, a milestone in building a future and cementing the "United" in the "United" States.

Ford's The Iron Horse was voted into The National Film Registry in 2011. How could it not? So far, 11 of Ford's films have been voted in, more than any other director (aside Howard Hawks' 11). I'm sure there will be more to come in the future.

The Iron Horse will enter the U.S. public domain in 2020. It can be seen on YouTube and Daily Motion—for free—now.

The Big Trail

The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930) Wow, this one is kinda fun.

Made in 1930, in the transition between the silent and sound eras,* The Big Trail is a big sprawling "wagon train" movie filmed in 65mm and stereo sound (although it only played that way in New York and Los Angeles—it was filmed twice by Walsh,*** in this format and in the standard Academy approved box format,** where more traditional close-ups were employed), the wide screen taking advantage of large vistas of horizon in gen-u-ine outdoor locations and long meandering lines of properly scrabble-wood wagons and hastily improvised buildings—there isn't a right angle in any of the construction along the route—and the buck-skin and gingham costumes look lived in, sweat-stained and grubby. It actually has a more authentic feel than later films that covered the same territory. As films progressed, the pains director Walsh took to create that realistic thread-bare look were replaced by the studios' efforts to make everything well-scrubbed and travel-worthy. But here, everything is in a state of chaos in need of some permanence. That'll happen when everything stops moving.

But, at this juncture, less than a hundred years after such odysseys actually occurred, the portrayal of the way west feels more real, despite the simplistic story, the "Big Misunderstanding" love story (the path of love, like cross-country trails, never runs smooth) and some quite amazing set-pieces. Fording a river actually looks dangerous with cattle swimming downstream with the swift current, and overturning wagons featuring some inelegant (because it wasn't planned) stunt-work. And there's a sequence, unscripted and jerry-rigged, of lowering wagons and cattle down a cliff-side by ropes, that is just fascinating to watch, especially when things literally go "south" (Walsh and his cameraman managed to to catch the mayhem as some knots slipped).

Along the way, we see every sort of terrain: plains, desert, rivers, cliffs, mountains and forests, and because the trip takes a year, four seasons of various weathers, all giving Walsh a new impediment to the travelers to exploit for drama, from blistering desert heat to nearly white-out conditions of snow—and there's one torrential down-pour that bogs wagons, horses, and men alike in a constant slick of mud. Who needs melodrama when God and Nature are throwing everything in the pioneers' path to slow them down? For a film of this era, it is amazing to see the efforts made to bring it all to the screen...and with the added use of on-set sound—in the outdoor settings—it is quite the stunning achievement.

But, there's one other thing The Big Trail is known for: It is also the first starring role of a full-time prop-master and part-time bit player named Marion Morrison, who, starting with this film, would operate under the name given him by director Walsh, "John Wayne."

Interesting to watch this kid who would become a screen legend. He had yet to learn the pausing cadence that would give his sentences more weight, and there's a tendency to put a little too much of everything into the role, the glowers, the tightening jaw-muscles, the "hail-fellow-well-met" jocularity—if you want to see how Wayne plays it, there's a lot of similarity to how Ricky Nelson ambled through the role of "Colorado" in Hawks' Rio Bravo).

But, the casualness is there, always was. Even here, his first starring role, there is the informal grace of how he'd just lean back in a scene. There's a sequence where Wayne is talking to a large group of elders—because of the primitive sound equipment in camera trucks, everyone is encouraged to shout the dialogue a bit as it was filmed outdoors—while he sits cross-legged on a horse, as naturally as if he was draped over a dining room chair, the horse shuffling nervously despite having steadying hands on him, and Wayne balanced effortlessly, not missing a beat, even swinging his foot in conversation.

There are things that are a little wince-inducing: it's all very white hat/black hat with the bad guys (Tyrone Power Sr., Charles Stevens, and Ian Keith all pushing villainy at the top of their lungs that you almost think there should be a "hiss" track whenever they walk on-screen), Marguerite Churchill is a trifle too "fiddle-dee-dee" for my taste, and there's some rather antiquated humor about mothers-in-law, and goofy ethnics (hard to place...Swedish?) that's just a step away from the "gag-men" antics of the silent era.

But, I spent the majority of the movie goggle-eyed at the incredible shots by Walsh and his cinematographer Arthur Edeson**** (a mainstay at both Fox and Warners, Edeson has an impressive list of credits, in which he managed to squeeze in among the B-pictures and programmers Frankenstein, The Maltese Falcon, The Old Dark House, and Casablanca) that take advantage of the western locations and The Big Sky (still remarkably free of air-traffic), artfully composed as if they were framed by Frederic Remington.

Look past the dated material, and some of the more vaudevillian (and vaude-villain) moments and there are many visual wonders to behold here, brought about by one of the great directors who doesn't get nearly enough attention: Raoul Walsh.

* Transitions are handled by the insertion of title cards anticipating the action of the next episode.

** In addition, there were foreign language versions shot at the same time—Spanish, French and German—with different casts.

**** The first outdoor sound film—In Old Arizona—was made the year before, photographed by Edeson and planned out by Walsh, who was set to star (as the Cisco Kid, no less) and direct until the traffic accident (a jackrabbit smashed into his windshield) that cost him his right eye.

***

The History of John Ford: Drums Along the Mohawk

When Orson Welles was asked what movies he studied before embarking on directing Citizen Kane he replied, "I studied the Old Masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." 

Running parallel with our series about Akira Kurosawa ("Walking Kurosawa's Road"), we're running a series of pieces about the closest thing America has to Kurosawa in artistry—director John Ford. Ford rarely made films set in the present day, but (usually) made them about the past...and about America's past, specifically (when he wasn't fulfilling a passion for his Irish roots). In "The History of John Ford" we'll be gazing fondly at the work of this American Master, who started in the Silent Era, learning his craft, refining his director's eye, and continuing to work deep into the 1960's (and his 70's) to produce the greatest body of work of any American "picture-maker," America's storied film-maker, the irascible, painterly, domineering, sentimental puzzle that was John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

Drums Along the Mohawk (John Ford, 1939) "Every generation must make its own way—in one place or another"—so director Ford caps the start of his career-long history of the United States...with a wedding, for this earliest episode in that timeline. The year is 1776, but instead of the politicians haggling over language in Philadelphia meeting rooms, he's—again—on the frontier, a couple day's ride from Albany, New York. Gil Martin (Henry Fonda) and his new wife Lana (Claudette Colbert) are embarking on a mission, just as the newly formed states are, "to form a more perfect union."  

It won't be easy for either organization, with threats, both internal and external. There are attacks by Natives against the encroaching settlers (but, even here, Ford has them blameless—if brutally opportunistic—as the Iroquois are taking their orders from a Tory agent, played by an eye-patched John Carradine, who is paying the tribe for their berserker destruction of the homesteads, burning everything—buildings, crops and possessions—down to the bare Earth, leaving nothing, not even anything the tribe could steal or profit by), internal strife among the villagers, and the hard-scrabble existence that tests the fiber of the town-folk.

Before long, the citizens are driven to the local fort housing the militia, always at the ready for a call to arms from General Washington. In the meantime are the struggles to maintain a family, order, and petty grievances that threaten to disrupt the community from within. But, a shared sense of purpose—community-building reflecting the larger picture of nation-building, pulls the majority of them through.

Early on, Gil and Lana are burned out of their humble cabin-home, built by Gil. They take up lodgings with the widow McKlennar (Edna May Oliver) as workers and soon, are back on their feet, on a par with everyone who has suffered hardships.

This is Ford's first film in color, and it's eye-popping Technicolor, and the director, who was discriminating in his choice of which format to use—his last two were in monochrome—fills the screen with detailed color; the very first shot, after the needle-pointed credits, is a pull-out from the bouquet that Lana is holding at her wedding, and there are fiery sunsets and sunrises framed in the same Ford-fashion, with just the right amount of horizon for contrast. The greens are the most verdant, and fire seems to play an important part of the scheme of things, the flaming colors unnatural against a pastoral backdrop.

Fire figures in a violent double-whammy that strikes one unexpectedly towards the end of the film, as a scout (played by Francis Ford, the director's brother) is wheeled out in front of the fort in a wagon of straw, which is then set alight by torches and flaming arrows.* Just when that scene is set in the mind, one of the settlers (played by Ford stock-player Ward Bond) is shot in the shoulder with a flaming arrow. A flaming arrow. Okay, sure, the arrow is a special effect on a wire, but the fire is real and Bond and his clothing are just as flammable as the next guy and his clothing. The level of violence is turned up just a notch from what one might expect, and one is taken aback by it.

Ford could do that—make you feel all-complacent and tear the Navajo-rug out from under you.

But it's a great movie. Action-oriented, with the only difference being that the significant events—the bigger picture—is all happening off-screen, rather than being part of the tapestry of events. Ford would be doing that in the future (both in his career and the events that shaped the country), but this is a very fine beginning.

Ford's first film in color—and Technicolor, at that—does not disappoint.

* It works just as dramatically here as it did in 1987, when Kubrick used something similar in Full Metal Jacket.