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Lay them rails
Ever since The Great Train Robbery of 1903, considered by many to be the first
Western movie, railroads have played a key part in the genre. Even before that,
in fact, because all through the nineteenth century ballads, dime novels and
plays had featured them. In The Fast Mail,
a play of 1899, two trains chased one another across the stage. It must have
been a remarkable sight. Buffalo Bill incorporated a train robbery into his
Wild West spectacle. Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus is centered on conflict between farmers and the
railroad.
Western movies started on the railroad
At first, railroads in Westerns were a
symbol of progress and advancement. The shining example is John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), a monumental film
of “manifest destiny” describing the spanning of the continent, and rich with
Indian attacks, cattle drives to feed the workers, skullduggery by local land
developers, the shenanigans at the ‘Hell on Wheels’ temporary towns, and even
appearances by Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok. For Ford, the construction of
the railroads symbolizes the unity of the nation, as desired by his great hero
Abraham Lincoln.
He regards the Iron Horse with suspicion
Two years later, and in a lighter and less epic
vein, Fox returned to the theme with its Tom Mix picture The Great K & A Train Robbery. Tom is a railroad detective,
sent for by the company owner to investigate a series of pesky robberies. Naturally
the railroad boss has a glam daughter, Madge
(Dorothy Dwan, Dorothy in the silent Wizard
of Oz the year before) – for it was compulsory in them days to have a glam
daughter, and Tom duly falls for her. And of course there is much derring-do.
The proper way to board a train
One great thing about The Great K & A is that the exterior
scenes are filmed on the great Durango-to-Silverton railroad in Colorado. Now,
if, like me, you have ridden that train (now, sadly, no longer steam driven)
you will revel in any movie that features it, and many do. Denver
& Rio Grande, Santa
Fe, The
Lone Hand, The
Maverick Queen, A
Ticket to Tomahawk, Colorado
Territory and Night
Passage, to name but a few. And John Wayne used it for The Sons of Katie Elder (1965): now, Wayne was a
Fox prop boy and uncredited extra on The Great
K & A, so maybe that’s how he developed an affection for the
Durango/Silverton line. But no matter how good or bad the Western is, it’s always enjoyable
to see that train running up through that narrow gorge.
Fab
I couldn’t possibly list all the
railroad Westerns that were made over the years. There are far too many. But I
will mention a few key ones, and illustrate how the attitude to railroads
changed.
Paramount’s Union Pacific in 1939, directed by Cecil B DeMille and starring
Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck, had much in common with The Iron Horse, above all its manifest destiny scope, and both pictures
end with the famous meeting of the CPR and UPR at Promontory Point, modeling
the scene on the famous photograph. DeMille’s picture, coming at the end of a
decade of economic depression, concentrates on the construction giving work to
ex-soldiers and boosting trade.
1869 1924 1939
Promontory Point, Utah
But by the time of Union Pacific the villains of the piece were no so much local
crooks trying to make a fast buck, which they had been in Ford's picture, as scheming Eastern financiers, speculators
who have bought stock in the Central Pacific and want the meeting point to be
farther east. This ‘crooked railroad men’ aspect was even more evident in Fox’s
Technicolor blockbuster of the same year, Jesse James.
All aboard
In this picture (and many subsequent
Jesse James tales) the railroads are exploitative corporate Easterners oppressing
decent Western folk, and the companies are legitimate targets. Their lackeys are the vile and murderous Pinkertons. The on-screen intro to Jesse James reads:
“The advance of the
railroads was, in some cases, predatory and unscrupulous. Whole communities
found themselves victimized by an ever-growing ogre - the Iron Horse.”
There is
of course no evidence whatsoever that Frank and Jesse James were fighting on
behalf of gutsy Western farmers against wicked capitalists, and certainly not
that they distributed their ill-gotten loot to the poor. Actually, when they
started robbing trains the target was the express companies transporting money, not the railroads themselves. But it became the standard thesis,
and 'justified' the depredations of the James-Younger gang.
There were still Westerns that
emphasized the march of progress. Warners’ Dodge City, another of the big Westerns of 1939, opens with a race between a
train and a stagecoach. The train wins, and General Dodge, who is on board, declares,
“Gentlemen, that’s a symbol of America’s future.” In the newly named Dodge City
the general makes a speech about how the railroad will bring the blessings of
civilization, and his discourse is studded with emotive words such as home, church and school.
There is still, though, a whiff of regret that the stage lost the race; the old
ways of the West are disappearing, like the buffalo. In a later picture too,
The Professionals (1966) the ‘values’ of the railroad baron and Eastern corporate
capitalism generally are contrasted with the decency, independence and
do-the-right-thing grit of the Westerners, led by Lee Marvin.
The old races the new
In 1946 the blockbuster Duel in the Sun had a railroad theme, and
once again it means progress. The Eastern-educated lawyer Joseph Cotten favors
its coming while his old-fashioned and blustering father Lionel Barrymore wants
to stop it at any cost.
In Johnny Guitar (1954) Vienna (Joan Crawford) has built her fancy saloon to profit
from the railroad’s imminent arrival, but her bitter enemy, cattle-owner Emma
(Mercedes McCambridge) spits at her that it will bring in “Dirt farmers! Is that what you want?” Nothing
will do for Emma but to hang Vienna and burn her place to the ground. This theme was
taken up by Sergio Leone in the following decade when, in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) he had Claudia Cardinale follow
Vienna’s example. But this time there is no Emma ranged against her: there is
instead the ice-cold killer Henry Fonda, brilliantly cast, a hired gun for the railroad who, in a shocking
moment, kills a small boy. The railroad has become truly evil now: Fonda’s
boss, Mr. Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) is a ruthless corporate baron of the worst
kind, ready to go to any lengths to dispossess the farmers and run his line
through. Leone seems to be questioning capitalism and even the idea of
technological progress.

Claudia's waiting on the train...
...but she won't get it if Frank has his way
Randolph Scott loved building railroads,
perhaps because as a young man he had trained as an engineer. He built the Canadian Pacific in 1949, and it is
villain Victor Jory who describes how the new railroad will change their life
for the worse and who whips up the Indians against it. It is taken for granted by
the goodies that the railroad will bring peace, prosperity and a plethora of
progress.
Don't worry: Randy isn't hurt badly
Soon after, in Columbia's Santa Fe (1951), Randy was at it again. This time he is track boss
of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (AT&SF) and determined at all costs
to drive his line Westwards through Kansas, Colorado and down into New Mexico. Naturally
he has to face the opposition of outlaws, Indians and the rival Denver and Rio
Grande RR but by grit, courage and resourcefulness he will, like the true Western
hero he is, win out.
And as if that wasn’t enough, in 1952 there he
was yet again, building a line up from Virginia City to Carson City. A banker and a railroad baron (Larry Keating and
Thurston Hall), whom you obviously expect to be crooks, because they are a banker and a railroad baron, but amazingly aren’t,
want, rather absurdly, to build a rail link to avoid the stage robberies
plaguing the Comstock area (they don't say why the robbers wouldn't just start robbing the trains instead). They get happy-go-lucky railroad engineer Scott to
build the line through mountainous terrain. Little does Randy know at the time
(in fact it takes most of the movie before he works it out, doh) that
slimy mine-owner Raymond Massey is the one behind the stage robberies all along. In
this one the technology is well represented, with steam-driven drills cutting
through the rock, so that's something.
Randy builds another line
Paramount's Denver and Rio Grande the same year had a similar plot to Santa Fe. It’s one of my favorite
railroad Westerns of all time, in part because of the head on crash between two
locomotives. These days steam trains are so rare and expensive that even
railroad Westerns such as the 3:10 to Yuma remake (2007) have to fudge one with a hundred yards of track and
fake smoke behind some buildings. The TV show Hell on Wheels (2011+) made a locomotive out of Styrofoam and wood. Disney did it in The Lone Ranger (2013) with
computer graphics and special effects. But in the early 50s even mid-budget oaters could afford to crash two!
uh-oh
Santa Fe and Denver and Rio Grande concentrated on
the railroad war of 1879 between the D&RG and the AT&SF to run a line
up the narrow gorge (there was only room for one line) to the mining riches of
Leadville. It was a great Western episode, with Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday and
the Dodge City Gang providing the guns for the AT&SF, though the D&RG
finally won the war – in the courts. You can see how that would appeal to the
writers of Western movies, though for some odd reason Bat and Doc were written
out.
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe received a
lighter and more melodious treatment when Judy Garland sang about its glories
in The Harvey Girls (1946), a movie I
must get round to reviewing someday, despite its being a musical (ugh).
Folks around these parts get the time of day
From the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe
Kansas Pacific (1953) was yet another Western named for a
railroad company. Sterling Hayden, who had been the
bad railroad man in Denver and Rio Grande, is now a goody US
Army captain undercover as railroad engineer, determined to build the Kansas
Pacific line out to the West to provision forts for the coming Civil War. So
it’s not one of those great Manifest Destiny continent-spanning railroad-building
pictures. The railway isn’t being built to bring civilization to the West or
tame the far frontier or anything; it’s more a necessity to beat the South. His
opponent is future Confederate guerrilla leader Quantrill (Reed Hadley), determined
to stop him at any cost.
[Mmm, just had a thought: Quantrill appeared
in so many Westerns it could be time for a Quantrillorama, a ‘Quantrill in fact
and fiction’ post.]
That undercover business of Sterling’s harks
back to Tom Mix’s part in The Great K
& A Train Robbery mentioned above, and it also refers to the various
versions of Whispering Smith, because
he was a railroad detective too. And don’t forget railway ‘tec Matt Clark in Stories of the Century, capturing every
known outlaw ever seen in the West from before the Civil War to well into the
twentieth century, and all without aging a year. Wish I had that knack.
Whispering Smith was one of the great Western characters and he started life as the
hero of a novel by Frank H Spearman in 1906. Spearman wrote a lot of fiction
and non-fiction on the subject of railroads. His investigator was modeled on real-life Union Pacific detectives Timothy
Keliher and Joe Lefors. Whispering appeared on the screen on no fewer than eight
separate occasions, in four silent movies, in 1916, 1917, 1926, and 1927, and
then talkies in 1930, 1935, 1948 and 1952. A remarkable record. The ’48 one was
probably the most famous because it starred Alan Ladd in the title part, rather
unconvincingly, if truth be told. He reprised it on the radio too. In the 1948
version, a “true story” (that's what they
say), Ladd plays the railroad detective who, having dispatched two train-robber
brothers, suspects his best friend (Robert Preston, full of vim as ever, the
archetypal charming rogue) of harboring the third.
Sure enough, Preston turns out to be leader of a gang of train wreckers who
pillage the wrecks for loot. Then of course Audie Murphy assumed the mantle on
TV in Whispering Smith (NBC, 1961).

He whispered many times
Train robberies were such a
common occurrence in Western movies that you’d think you could hardly travel without
being subjected to one. R Michael Wilson in Great
Train Robberies of the Old West estimates that there were perhaps a
thousand robberies or attempted robberies from the end of the Civil War to
1910. Spread out over the years and the thousands of miles of track that isn’t
too many but it’s still an average of 22 a year, so that’s a not inconsiderable
likelihood. Famous train robbers we love to see were the Reno brothers, the
James Gang and the Daltons, as well as Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang. Of course ideally they would gallop alongside the speeding train and then leap aboard. Or their stunt doubles would.
Essential ingredient of the Western
Other ‘railroad’ Westerns you might want to
look at include Buckskin Frontier (1943), in which, bizarrely, the railroad company is the goody; Wyoming Mail (1950), in which Lee Marvin makes his Western debut as the train driver stabbed in the back; A Ticket to Tomahawk (also 1950) in which they implausibly run a hugely
heavy locomotive over a field without tracks; Rails into Laramie (1954), in which we almost get a D&RG-style head-on crash of two locomotives; Fury at Showdown (1957), in which farmers stand to gain if the railroad comes through but the inevitable crooked town boss is out to thwart them; Man from God’s Country (1958), in which this time the bad guy tries to stop the railroad bacause he owns a freight company that will go out of business; The Raiders (1963), in which Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane improbably help a Texas rancher against the railroad; and Wayne’s The Train Robbers (1973) obviously. But as I said before, there are so many that it’s
really pointless to go on.

Marvin's (brief) debut
Of course many of the real railroad magnates
were indeed far from honest upright citizens. There’s more than a germ of truth
in the idea of the ruthless company boss. I mentioned the AMC TV show Hell on Wheels earlier. That has as a
central character Thomas ‘Doc’ Durant, played by the excellent Colm Meaney. Durant gained a reputation for great ruthlessness. He is
rumored to have made a fortune smuggling contraband cotton from the Confederate
states during the war. It was said of him that "Like Samson he would not
hesitate to pull down the temple even if it meant burying himself along with
his enemies." And he was supremely good at raising money and securing
favorable national legislation. He had no qualms about what today would be
called insider trading, and he very profitably talked up the stock of the
M&M by saying the Union Pacific would link to it but secretly bought shares
in a competing line and then announced that the UPR would link to that. Durant
covered himself by having various politicians, including future President James
Garfield, as limited stockholders. Calling him a shrewd operator doesn’t really
cover it.

Durant and Gould: they weren't saints
By 1879 Jay Gould controlled 10,000 miles (16,000 km)
of railway, about one-ninth of the rail in the United States at that time, and
he had controlling interest in 15 percent of the country's railway tracks by
1882. He was attracted to
the construction and ownership of a railroad network not by the idea of running a passenger
and freight service, on which the margins would be modest, but as a
speculation, making the most of the huge government land grant that went with
laying the rails and manipulating the price of company stock.
Many of these
railroad companies were mired deep in graft, bribing all manner of local and
national politicians. This led to a huge scandal, and a huge shock to the US
economy, whose seismic effects reached as far as the White House itself.
Some of the railroad bosses were indeed
dubious types, and Western movies had fun making them worse.
Well, that’s enough on railroads for
now, e-pards. Back soon.