The Iron Horse

John Ford, Fox, 1925. A surveyor’s son (George O’Brien) grows up chasing the transcontinental railroad and the men who killed his father. Madge Bellamy is the girl from the East. Ford shot in Nevada with real locomotives, the Jupiter and the 119 for the Promontory finish, and a camp large enough the trades called it a town. Native resistance and Irish track gangs are written as 1925 wrote them. It is the picture that moved Ford from programmers toward the landscape style he kept. The last spike is a ceremony the film has been building.