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.

This Day in Film History (Death of George O’Brien—Honored Vet, Western Star, Inspiration for Novelist Son)

September 4, 1985—George O'Brien, decorated veteran of two world wars and a Western star long forgotten by movie audiences who had made him a star in the Twenties and Thirties, passed away at age 86 in Tulsa, Okla., his once-magnificent build a casualty of a stroke six years before that had left him bedridden.

Well, in that last sentence, “largely forgotten” might be more correct than “long forgotten.” For anyone the least bit interested in John Ford movies, O'Brien is remembered for his appearances, even after his star faded, in the informal “stock company” that “Pappy” kept from one production to another. 

For fans of fine literature, through son Darcy O’Brien, he inspired one of the saddest but most uproarious Hollywood coming-of-age novels, A Way of Life, Like Any Other.

Since the theater and film worlds love to transfer stories to far more modern settings (e.g., The Tempest becoming Forbidden Planet), let’s try something similar here. 

Only this time, let’s imagine pre-revolutionary France translated to Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when O’Brien and wife Marguerite Churchill, a former actress,  were living like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles and son Darcy was fawned over like a dauphin. It was paradise.

It couldn’t last, of course. Just as a revolution and their own personal failings led to the royal family’s flight from the palace, so the O’Briens saw their comfortable way of life end because of their own personal circumstances and a studio system no longer able or interested in finding a place for them.

The son of the San Francisco Chief of Police, George had been an excellent athlete (football, baseball, track and swimming) in high school and college, and during WWI won the light-heavyweight Pacific fleet boxing title. 

He parlayed his deep knowledge of horses (he’d been raised around police stables) and build to become successively a movie cameraman, stunt man, part-time actor, then a leading man.

O’Brien’s best-regarded and most prominent nongenre role might have been as the young country husband who, manipulated by another woman, plans to murder his wife in F.W. Murnau’s 1927 Sunrise. But his most conspicuous success came in westerns. 

Ford plucked him from obscurity to cast him as the lead in perhaps the archetypal silent western, The Iron Horse (1924), and he made the successful transition to talkies, including in an adaptation of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and a whole slew of B-westerns made for Fox and RKO. 

Beefcake shots of him shirtless, virtually guaranteed to please his many female fans, won him the nickname “The Chest” in Hollywood.

The activity that may have meant the most to O’Brien, however, was service in the Navy. Already a recipient of five decorations for bravery under fire as a stretcher-bearer in WWI, he didn’t even wait for Pearl Harbor to re-enlist again for WWII service. 

(RKO had to issue a press release announcing the news to irate fans wondering why one of their favorite stars was no longer appearing on the big screen.)

Once again, O’Brien served with distinction, and in even more important engagements this time, as a "beachmaster" involved in a dozen or more island invasions. 

But the war wreaked havoc on his career and his marriage, with Churchill complaining that her husband had been “changed radically” by it. George's roles largely dried up, and their finances became pinched. 

They divorced, after 15 years of marriage, in 1948, with Marguerite winning custody of Darcy and his sister Orin.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a roman a clef. or "novel with a key." The title comes from a remark that the Irish poet Seamus Heaney made about O’Brien’s childhood on the family estate (called "Casa Fiesta" in the novel). 

The irony, of course, is that this upbringing was anything but "like any other.” How many people, after all, become used to the likes of Ford and Charles Laughton coming to the house?

Darcy O’Brien does not provide names for the narrator’s parents, but the details of their lives do coincide closely enough with those of George O'Brien and Marguerite Churchill to leave little doubt whom he is writing about. There are even enough clues about background characters to permit guesses about their real-life counterparts.

(For instance: as an adolescent, the narrator spends considerable time with the family of “Sam Caliban,” a colorful writer-director with a penchant for gambling. Caliban, we are told, had directed the narrator’s mother and Will Rogers onscreen. As it happened, Marguerite Churchill and Rogers had been directed in Ambassador Bill by Sam Taylor, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s The Tempest, featuring a character named…Caliban.)

Both O’Brien and his ex-wife emerge as rather pathetic figures after the divorce in their son’s account (which won the P.E.N.'s Ernest Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1978). 

Marguerite Churchill attempted without success to resume the acting career she had given up to raise a family. After a handful of appearances on film and TV after the divorce, she lived abroad. 

Darcy depicts her drowning in promiscuity and drink, oblivious of the effect of her lifestyle on her tween son (she is even proud that, age 12, he can mix virtually any drink for guests at parties).

George O’Brien emerges somewhat more sympathetically, but still troubled: no longer maintaining the handsome looks that had sustained his career for so long, yet—even as his financial prospects continued to wane—painfully slow to shed the illusion that his career was over. 

(Old friend Ford continued to toss minor assignments his way from time to time, including a bit part, as late as 1964, in Cheyenne Autumn.)

By Darcy O’Brien’s account, his father was able to achieve something of a measure of grace at last, courtesy of a renewed interest in Catholicism and a deep pride and connection to the Navy. George O’Brien went back on active duty during the Korean and even Vietnam wars. 

By the time he retired, he had not only achieved the rank of captain, but had been recommended four times for promotion to admiral. He was buried at sea off the coast of San Diego. 

That was, I think, an appropriate metaphor for his career. In the postwar period, because of an anti-trust case lost before the Supreme Court, Hollywood had left him adrift. 

The one Tinseltown figure who continued to find room in his films for him was the one who, because of his own wartime service, had the deepest affinity for naval men: Ford. 

It is sadly instructive to compare O'Brien's career trajectory with that of another college athlete propelled by Ford to stardom, John Wayne. 

While O'Brien was off the screen for five crucial years, serving his country, Wayne was capitalizing on the sudden leap to fame he had taken, after a dozen years as a bit player, in Ford's classic western Stagecoach. 

During WWII, Wayne took every deferment to which he was entitled as a father in his thirties, while others--very much including O'Brien and Ford--chose a different route. 

The price those Hollywood figures paid--Ford, a wound incurred while shooting the Battle of Midway, and O'Brien, a dimming career--stands in sharp contrast to "The Duke."