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"The pictorial history of the building of the first transcontinental railroad" begins with charming modesty, "Lincoln the Builder" (Charles Edward Bull) turns his back so boy and girl can kiss. Civil War's North and South, but also the East and West of an expanding country. The "two-fingered Indian" is really a landowner (Fred Kohler) inflaming the local Cheyenne, the son of the man he killed (George O'Brien) carries dream and revenge. Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok turn up, Judge Roy Bean goes by another name, towns are abandoned and erected. "Everything but the old houses moves on wheels." An epic sense of flux for John Ford, a young nation's restlessness plus a young medium's vigor. The saloon that becomes a courthouse, riding shadows projected on the side of the arrow-pricked train, bovine masses dotting the screen. The rugged hero is suspended between nature and the civilization that he's helped build, a bedrock for future John Wayne roamers (Stagecoach, The Searchers). The heroine (Madge Bellamy) is rather colorless, there's more cinematic interest in the rambunctiously cocked eyebrows of J. Farrell MacDonald at the center of the immigrant whirl laying the tracks. "'Twas me ilegant Irish iloquence that did it—was it not?" George Catlin is a continuous point of visual reference, the camera mounted on the locomotive advancing through a nascent settlement is repeated in Once Upon a Time in the West. Battle on the prairie, where a fallen marauder is mourned by his mutt, then the golden spike at Promontory Summit, "the buckle in the girdle of America." Responses are by Walsh (The Big Trail) and DeMille (Union Pacific). With Cyril Chadwick, Will Walling, Francis Powers, Jim Welch, George Waggner, James A. Marcus, and Gladys Hulette. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |