The Iron Horse (1925) on Netflix
NR19252h 29mDramaHistoryRomanceWestern
Springfield, Illinois: surveyor David Brandon dreams of a transcontinental railroad and takes his son Davy west to chart a route. They find a pass that could shorten the line by 200 miles.
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- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.2/102,784 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
David Brandon, a surveyor in Springfield, Illinois, daydreams about a railroad that would cross the continent, an idea that railroad owner Thomas Marsh mocks. A young Abraham Lincoln stops by, and Brandon tells him he intends to head west with Davy, his son; Miriam Marsh, the railroad man's daughter, says a sad goodbye to the boy. Three months into the journey, an attack in the Cheyenne Hills leaves Davy on his own among frontiersmen. Congress then authorizes two railways, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, and Chinese immigrants and Civil War veterans lay the track, with William F. Cody supplying buffalo meat. When the Cheyenne raid a payroll and supply train, Marsh looks for a shortcut through the Black Hills, and Miriam pleads with the unpaid, freezing crews to keep working.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Iron Horse (1925)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director John Ford was injured while filming the buffalo stampede: he was in a plank-covered trench when the animals ran over his position, but producer Sol Wurtzel was so encouraged by the rushes that he urged Ford to continue.
- Central Pacific loaned Ford its engine No. 3, the C.P. Huntington; 50 horses were hitched to its front and dozens of men pushed from behind, while hidden wires attached to another train inched the locomotive along on a sled.
- Because the town had no hotels, Sol Wurtzel rented sleeper cars from the Al G. Barnes Circus for the cast and crew of 200; the cars were flea-ridden and the underdressed Californians wore their film costumes to stay warm in below-zero temperatures.
- The cast was a broad mix of ethnicities, including Chinese men who had worked as labourers building the Central Pacific, and members of the Cheyenne, Paiute, Pawnee and Sioux tribes, who also stood in as Chinese, and vice versa.
- John Ford's upward angle as the locomotive advances over the camera became essential visual grammar for Westerns, reused in Sergio Leone's 1968 Once Upon a Time in the West, while his shot of the railroad advancing on the tracklayers is quoted by Cecil B. DeMille in Union Pacific (1939) as well as Leone.
- In December 2011 The Iron Horse was selected for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, which said the film introduced to American and world audiences a reverential, elegiac mythology that has influenced many subsequent Westerns.
