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After Davy Brandon's (George O'Brien) father is killed by an Indian tribe led by a white man, Brandon strives to realize his father's ambition of building an American transcontinental railway.
Brandon is also wooing his childhood sweetheart, Miriam (Madge Bellamy), but discovers that she is already married. Her husband, Peter Jesson (Cyril Chadwick), is the man who killed his father.
Dubbed an 'historical super-western', The Iron Horse certainly had all the trappings of an epic production: a fair-sized habitation had to be built in Arizona, where most of the film was shot, to house the cast and crew numbering some 6,000 people. It was to the young John Ford that supervision of this vast project was entrusted. Not yet thirty years old in 1924, Ford had been churning out one-and-two-reelers since 1917 and The Iron Horse was his first production on such a scale.
The themes that would dominate Ford's work - the 'settling' of the West, the ambiguous incursion of 'civilization' into its 'wilderness' - are all present and correct in this early, silent example of his work in the Western genre. Along with the building of the transcontinental railway the film also features other key generic sequences: a cattle drive, an Indian attack and a bar-room brawl, as well as the appearance of legendary and historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill.
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