This Day in Film History (John Ford’s Silent ‘Iron Horse’ Makes Loud Noise at Box Offices)

August 28, 1924— John Ford might have exhibited contempt for studio bosses, but they just had to grin and bear it—especially when they saw the results for his silent western The Iron Horse, which premiered in New York City on this day.

Over the next four decades, whenever the western as a genre looked licked with audiences or critics, Ford came riding to the rescue, like one of his pistol-packing heroes. It even happened a mere 20 years after American cinema, for all intents and purposes, began with The Great Train Robbery, as audiences were already beginning to tire of the form.

Critics were turning up their noses at innumerable William Hart and Tom Mix shoot-‘em-ups when Paramount’s The Covered Wagon (1923) took a different tone: patriotic, focused on the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Fox Film Corp. decided to one-up its rival with a movie about the transcontinental railroad, to be made by its rising in-house filmmaker.

The Iron Horse not only was the movie that effectively made Ford an A-list director by virtue of making the top-grossing film of the year, but also the one that established his template for the rest of his career: dragging cast and crew hundreds of miles from studio bean-counters and nay-sayers, out on location, where he could act as a combination of general and summer camp director.

The 29-year-old was already carving out a niche as a cranky, go-my-own way helmsman, having been called back to a movie he’d been removed from, Straight Shooting (1917), after Universal head Carl Laemmle realized that, even with his penchant for breaking rules, Ford was a talented moviemaker.

Over the next six years, Ford would make for Universal and the studio he then moved to, Fox, more than 30 movies.

But Ford was entrusted with an especially heavy responsibility at the end of that period with this new assignment. This, he understood, was going to be an epic, 2½ hours long.

The first thing he did was haul the 300 cast and crew members on circus trains out to Dodge, Nevada, more than 270 miles from Los Angeles. The location shooting would not only lend a greater sense of realism but, more important from Ford’s perspective, remove him from day-to-day scrutiny from Fox.

Not that the studio didn’t try. At one point, Ford read a message from Fox, urging him to shoot faster to stay within the budget. By way of a response, he held the message aloft and asked a sharpshooter to shoot a hole in it, sending the note back where it came from.

By starting location shooting right after the new year, Ford and his army of film professionals were also going to get some sense of the privation that 19^th-century pioneers had experienced.

“There was real suffering on that picture,” property man Lefty Hough recalled. “It was hard, tough, awfully primitive conditions. Christ, it was cold.”

They arrived just as a “baby blizzard” blew in. Temperatures dropped so low that crew members slept in the warm army uniforms the studio provided. (That didn’t prevent a dining car steward from dying from pneumonia he had contracted three weeks into shooting.)

(See Linda Laban's article this week in The Guardian for more details on the harrowing shoot.)

One morning, everyone awoke to find a fresh snowfall had blown in overnight. The shooting schedule had called for the ground to be barren of snow, so everyone set to work, successfully shoveling out within an hour.

What could have made matters worse was that there was no finished script as shooting began. That, in a way, suited Ford just fine: It made everybody on set even more dependent on him to finish the picture.

While the cameras were rolling, Ford could be crusty, even bullying and abusive. When they stopped for the day, he acted more like a benevolent dictator.  In the evenings, the small temporary city he had set up enjoyed dancing, songs (often featuring the mariachi musicians he loved), and even a bootlegger.

(Ben Mankiewicz's recent multi-episode entry in his "The Plot Thickens" podcast has great details on the fun after-hours set on this and other movies directed by "Pappy" Ford.)

The film’s young star, George O’Brien, would epitomize another aspect of Ford’s career: tapping a character actor with just a few credits for a career-making turn. Fifteen years later, Ford would do the same, with more lasting results, for John Wayne in Stagecoach.

But O’Brien shared some traits with Ford that The Duke couldn’t, including Irish-American ancestry and fierce pride in his naval service. Even when O’Brien’s career faded after WWII, Ford made room for him in his “stock company” of actors, including Fort Apache (1948) and the director’s last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

(More than a half-century after O’Brien and Ford worked together on The Iron Horse, the actor’s son Darcy O’Brien gave a starring role to his father and a supporting one to “Pappy” in his roman a clef about growing up a prince of Hollywood, A Way of Life, Like Any Other.)

When Ford was finished, he had miraculously brought The Iron Horse in under the $280,000 budget set by Fox (which itself was a bargain compared with the $500,000 allotted by Paramount for The Covered Wagon). It grossed $1.5 million, propelling him to the forefront of American filmmakers.

Ironically, of his four Oscar victories for Best Director, not one came from any of the 56 westerns he made throughout his career as Hollywood’s most honored filmmaker.