USA, 135 minutes
Director: Cecil B. DeMille
Writers: Walter DeLeon, C. Gardner Sullivan, Jesse Lasky Jr., Jack Cunningham, Ernest Haycox, Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, Jeanie Macpherson, Stanley Rauh
Photography: Victor Milner
Music: Sigmund Krumgold, John Leipold, Gerard Carbonara, Leo Shuken, Victor Young
Editor: Anne Bauchens
Cast: Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Preston, Brian Donlevy, Henry Kolker, Akim Tamiroff, Lynne Overman, Robert Barrat, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Ridges, Evelyn Keyes, Regis Toomey, Lon Chaney Jr.
I've never entirely understood the term "movie movie" (and the internet is little help on it at the moment) but my sense is that it might apply to this cracking epical Cecil B. DeMille yarn about the building of the railroad from Omaha, Nebraska to Ogden, Utah. It's pulpy, old-fashioned, a little bit long, and thoroughly enjoyable. There's enough fizzy calculated confrontation and tension from scene to scene to keep it constantly interesting. It takes place shortly after the Civil War and plays much like an extended Dudley Do-Right cartoon, complete with a Snidely Whiplash villain (Brian Donlevy, in the screenshot above, who is often seen dunking the sucking end of his cigars into his drink, eww).
Also on view: buffalo, Indians, Mexicans, gold fever, fancy shooting, gamblers, horses—practically everything Western except Mormons, and they're probably waiting in Ogden. And trains, of course, the ol' Iron Horse, with not one but two spectacular train wrecks. The story is some extended nonsense that is at once about opening the Western frontier and also about the amiable political corruption that drove it. The bad guys don't get everything they want, but as usual in American history they get about 80%, enough to pay for the cigars and fancy suits.
