The Iron Horse (film)

The film is about the construction of the American first transcontinental railroad. It depicts Irish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants, as well as African Americans, as the men who did the backbreaking work that made this feat possible. The primary villain is an unscrupulous businessman who masquerades as a renegade Cheyenne. It culminates with the scene of driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869.

Among the extras used in the Central Pacific sequences were several Chinese men playing coolies who worked on the railroad. They were in fact retired Central Pacific Railroad employees who had helped build the first transcontinental railroad through the Sierras, who came out to participate in the filming as a lark.[4]

There is a note in the title before this scene that the two original locomotives from the 1869 event are used in the film, although this is false - both engines (Union Pacific No. 119 and Jupiter) were scrapped before 1910.

In December 2011, The Iron Horse was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.[5] In choosing the film, the Registry said that The Iron Horse "introduced to American and world audiences a reverential, elegiac mythology that has influenced many subsequent Westerns."[5]

The film's importance was recognized by the American Film Institute in the 2008 AFI's 10 Top 10, where it was nominated in the Western category.[6]

The film has a 78% rating in Rotten Tomatoes.[7]

The film was released on DVD in America in its full-length US version (accompanied by the truncated UK version). A 2011 release of The Iron Horse on DVD in the UK included both the US and International/UK versions of the picture, and a half-hour video-essay about the film by author and critic Tag Gallagher. The international version includes some variant shots and uses different names for some supporting characters; it also carries a dedication to the British railway engineer George Stephenson.[8]

Near the end of the film, it is stated that the actual "Jupiter" and "UP 116" were used in the scene. Besides incorrectly identifying the "UP 119" as the "UP 116", both engines had been scrapped 21 and 15 years earlier. Of interest, however, what appears to be the Central Pacific's "C.P. Huntington", now on display in Sacramento, California, is being manhandled up a steep grade on a sledge made of logs.

Starting in the early 1920s the publishing house Grosset and Dunlap crafted a deal with the prominent Hollywood studios to issue novelizations of their major, original releases and among those was The Iron Horse (1924, 329pp). The author was Edwin C. Hill, then a journalist, who would become a prominent radio broadcaster, best remembered for a show called The Human Side of the News.

• List of American films of 1924

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Iron Horse (film).

• The Iron Horse essay by David Kiehn on the National Film Registry website
• The Iron Horse at IMDb
• Synopsis at AllMovie
• Stills at acinemahistory.com
• The Iron Horse on Amazon Prime Video