Had the Oscars came in 1924, when director John Ford’s epic western The Iron Horse was released, and the critically acclaimed film would have swept the board. While it may be largely forgotten today, this black-and-white silent film, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on August 28, marked the moment when Jack Ford – a former prop man who quit on a whim, did some acting, and was initially hired as a director solely because of his availability – became the master director John Ford, the director many still celebrate as the greatest of all time. When The Iron Horse was inducted into the Library of Congress film archive in 2011, the official citation said that the film “established Ford’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished directors.”
Ford remains the director with the most Oscars of all time, winning four awards for feature films—The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Valley of the Fallen (1941), and The Victor (1952)—and two for the World War II documentaries The Battle of Midway (1942) and The Seventh of December (1943). None of them were Westerns, a genre that Ford adored, shaped, and left its mark on everywhere. This is perhaps inappropriate, considering that he grew up on the coast of Maine among Irish immigrants. As a teenager, Jack Feeney followed his older brother, star actor and director Francis Ford, to Hollywood, took his surname, and learned on the pioneer’s sets at Universal Pictures. With a shortage of directors, Universal boss Carl Laemmle hired him in 1917 to direct cowboy star Harry Carey in Straight Shooting, simply because “Jack Ford screams well.”
Three years after Ford joined Fox Film in 1920, he was hired by producer William Fox to make a Western to rival Paramount Pictures’ 1923 blockbuster The Covered Wagon. Ford’s answer was The Iron Horse: two and a half hours of history, drama and picturesque beauty—which far exceeded the budget. “Most of the film was shot in Nevada,” says Ford’s biographer Joseph McBride. “It was freezing cold and the conditions were harsh. But Ford liked to be on location, far from the studios.” Fox reportedly sent someone to the location to keep Ford within budget. Ford read the message, held it up, and called for a sniper to fire. “He shot a hole in it, and Ford sent it back to Fox in response,” says McBride.
Overall, however, Fox was not disappointed. Critical success was one thing, but The Iron Horse’s high box office numbers boosted Ford’s status within the industry.
“I always say that The Iron Horse was to Ford what Jaws was to Steven Spielberg,” says McBride. “It gave him a lot of clout and eventually, by the time he was 30, he was an A-list celebrity.”
The plot of The Iron Horse follows the construction of the United States’ first transcontinental railroad, consisting of the Union Pacific (west of Omaha, Nebraska) and the Central Pacific (initially east of Sacramento, California). Ford’s film, shot mostly in Nevada, follows the painstaking, hand-hewn construction of the railroad in a dry, documentary style – the opening credits begin: “Accurate and true to every detail of the fact…” But Charles Kenyon and John Russell’s screenplay is also full of drama: good guys, bad guys, and an idealistic hero and heroine who are also ill-fated lovers. The film’s finale features the final nail, a gold one, driven in at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, and the lovers’ happy forever embrace.
George O’Brien, a handsome, athletic ex-Marine, plays dashing Pony Express rider Davy Brandon. Young Brandon and his father explore the Sierras to find a pass that would facilitate the construction of a railroad. Triumphantly, they find one (Ford used the dramatic Beale’s Cut in Santa Clarita, 26 miles north of Hollywood – a location he returned to for later films). They are ambushed by a band of Cheyenne and Brandon witnesses his father brutally murdered by Deroux, a two-fingered white man disguised as a Cheyenne. Years later, after construction has begun, Brandon offers to search for the pass lost in his childhood memories and finds his childhood sweetheart Miriam (Madge Bellamy) engaged to the corrupt chief engineer of the UP (Cyril Chadwick), who is plotting with Deroux against the railroad.
Ford does not marginalize the Indians as villains among the 5,000 extras used. He shows how Deroux manipulates the Cheyenne into attacking. In one such scene, spectacularly captured by cinematographer George Schneiderman, a chief is fatally shot and falls to the ground. A dog appears (out of nowhere!), lovingly licks his face, and then lies down next to his body to mourn his death. Is Ford humanizing the attacking “Indians”? It certainly looks like it. On the other hand, the grief of his companions is very palpable when the Irish worker MacKay takes an arrow in the back, and a brotherly bond is poignantly portrayed. Violence is a perpetrator that promotes equal opportunity.
Ford later worked with the Diné, part of the Navajo people, in his brilliant 1939 western “Stagecoach” (which boosted John Wayne’s star status), and took the revolutionary step of allowing the Navajo to speak their own language in “Wagon Master” (1950). “He was ahead of his time. Ford had a progressive view of the West and great character studies,” says film critic José Ignacio Cuenca. And in an era when immigrants were routinely vilified, minorities also fared well under Ford’s eye. Italian, Irish and Chinese immigrants who laid tracks are portrayed as clean and well-dressed, even though they did dirty, sweaty work chopping rocks and laying tracks. “Ford’s views on race are complicated,” says McBride. “He was often compassionate and included many different races in his films. He really saw America as a multi-ethnic culture.”
But there is one figure that Ford revered: the Wild West, a vast and inscrutable landscape that he photographed in sweeping and grandiose images. According to the Library of Congress, The Iron Horse “introduced American and world audiences to a reverent, elegiac mythology that influenced many subsequent Westerns.”
“You need a special eye to direct a Western,” says Cuenca. “Ford had the ability to capture that beauty. But he had these complex characters. Ford, like Hitchcock, didn’t just make adventure films. He combined great landscapes with intimate character studies.”
By the early 1960s, Ford had fallen from grace. Nevertheless, in 1960 he made Sergeant Rutledge, one of the most important films of the civil rights movement, a western that openly dealt with widespread racism. The lead role was played by black actor Woody Strode, who played the role brilliantly. “The film is very daring; it didn’t go down well in the South,” says McBride. “But at that time, westerns were no longer taken seriously.” Nor did Ford, who was inextricably linked to the dusty Wild West. “They’re not just westerns,” emphasizes Cuenca. “It’s impossible to love films and not love John Ford. He is the greatest director of the western genre – but How Green Was My Valley and The Grapes of Wrath are two of the best films ever made.”
In August 1973, John Ford died of cancer at his home in Palm Desert, California. He was 79 years old and had made around 140 films in his 55-year career as a director, an astonishing body of work. As Orson Welles said, “I prefer the old masters – and by that I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.”
