A celebration of national unity and particularly of the contributions made by immigrants in conquering the West, The Iron Horse was epic filmmaking on the grandest scale. With the release of his fiftieth film in August 1924, the thirty-year-old Ford achieved what he had been working for, to be in the front ranks of American directors. Yet despite the visual magnificence of its best sequences, The Iron Horse too often seems dull and clumsy today. The limitations of its dime-novel plot and Ford’s inability to integrate the film’s stock characters into all the historical pageanty make The Iron Horse far less engaging than his 1926 silent Western 3 Bad Men, a splendid but less pretentious film that predictably attracted relatively little critical attention. As Ford’s first full-blown treatment of American history, The Iron Horse prefigures the masterpieces of his maturity. With documentary-like vividness, the film, photographed by George Schneiderman and Burnett Guffey, seems to magically transport viewers back into a real time and place in the nation’s past. During Nevada location shooting, Ford and Fox lavished great care and resources on re-creating physical details of railroad building, the westward movement of pioneer communities, clashes with Indians, a cattle drive, a buffalo herd, a saloon gun battle, and other seminal elements of Western mythology. The vigor and vitality of the action set pieces are continually weighed down by the far-fetched, poorly acted story by Charles Kenyon and John Russell about a railroad scout (George O’Brien) slowly unraveling a mystery from his family’s past, connected (improbably) with the building of the railroad. But when The Iron Horse had its East Coast premiere at New York’s Lyric Theatre, the “New York Times” reported, “Gray-haired men, whose fathers had constructed railroads in the pioneer days, were much moved by the spectacle in shadows that passed before their eyes. And some of them wept, not so much at the story… as at the sight of the men working with sledge hammers on the spike nails, as tie after tie and rail after rail were laid down.”

(from Searching for John Ford)