The Iron Horse
Starring: George O'Brien, Madge Bellamy, Will Walling
Director: John Ford
The film: With close to 50 films already under his belt at age 30, American director John Ford (Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath) had his first major success with The Iron Horse, a two-hour silent epic about the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s.
Many claims of authenticity were made by the production company at the time of the film's release, including that some of the elderly Chinese extras had actually worked on the railway, and that the two locomotives used in filming were the original articles. The latter claim was untrue, as both had been scrapped years earlier, but for the most part the historical setting of The Iron Horse is unusually convincing. Those employed as extras were often playing themselves - notably the cowboys and Indians, many of whom turned to Hollywood for scarce employment opportunities.
George O'Brien (Sunrise, Fort Apache), in his first leading role, became one of Hollywood's most successful early screen stars, and after The Iron Horse was Ford's first-choice actor before he switched to John Wayne, with whom he made 25 films. (Ford and O'Brien travelled around Asia together, and in March 1931 arrived in Hong Kong on a steamer from Manila.) O'Brien plays the son of a murdered railroad surveyor, and it's his quest for revenge against a dishonest landowner and his romance with a childhood sweetheart that hold the narrative together.