The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Contrary to Ford’s later claims, the script remained substantially intact during several months of filming. Ford himself admitted this in his deposition for an obscure 1925 copyright infringement lawsuit. Under oath, he stated, “there was very little change, really, from the original script.” They did unexpectedly encounter snow in Nevada, that was true, and the bad weather did force Ford to substitute a winter scene for one depicting summertime on the Utah plains and to abandon a comedy scene that didn’t work well in the snow. To compensate, Ford invented new comic characters who had not been in the original script. These “three Irishmen, playing the Three Musketeers,” were based on tales told to Ford by his uncle Mike Connelly about Civil War veterans who came to work on the railroad and still addressed each other by their military rank. At least, all three of the “musketeers” were supposed to be Irish. During postproduction in New York, when the movie was out of Ford’s hands, intertitle writer Charles Darnton changed one of them into a German, naming the characters Corporal Casey, Sergeant Slattery, and Private Schultz, probably to broaden the ethnic appeal. The three “musketeers” appear periodically throughout the movie. According to Ford’s 1927 testimony, “That’s about the only place where there was a really drastic change in the script made; otherwise, there were very few instances.”

  Furthermore, Ford was hardly a sure-handed, authoritative artist at this point in his career. Bellamy recalled that during big scenes of The Iron Horse, Ford sat high on a platform, nervously chewing on a white handkerchief and relaying orders through his assistant director and brother, Edward O’Fearna. (Their real last name was Feeney. Ford had changed his name when he first came to Hollywood to visit his brother Francis, who was acting at Universal using the last name Ford; Edward chose to be known as O’Fearna, an Irish-language version of Feeney.)

  Also contrary to Ford’s version of events, Fox didn’t pour more money into the production once he heard how well filming was going. To the contrary, he cut back to save money. Originally, the script called for the U.S. Cavalry to swoop in, fight off the Indians, and rescue young Davy Brandon after his father’s murder. Worried that the movie was getting too long and too expensive, Fox ordered the scene reworked. Davy is therefore found by three coonskin-capped frontiersmen who happen upon him just after he has buried his father. The downsizing brought out the best in Ford: the boy’s reluctance to leave his father’s grave is one of the movie’s most touching moments. Elsewhere, the director had plenty of opportunity to demonstrate his skill at panoramic spectacle, managing a cast that included 800 members of the Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Sioux tribes; 3,000 railway workers, 1,000 Chinese extras, 2,800 horses, 1,300 buffalo, and 10,000 Texas steers. Scenes abound of Indian attacks, laborers pounding railway stakes, and cattle herds bustling across the plains.

  When the production returned to Los Angeles in April 1924 to shoot interior scenes, Fox looked in on the set. Although he kept such a low profile that Madge Bellamy didn’t recognize him, he didn’t hesitate to interfere. He suggested—and got, of course—a slapstick scene untethered to the rest of the plot. The character involved never appears before or after, but following the town’s move from North Platte to Cheyenne, a dentist is ready to pull a tooth from the swollen jaw of Corporal Casey, who has never before shown any sign of such distress. Casey tries to run away, but his two friends and the dentist push him into a chair. At the moment of extraction, Sergeant Slattery sticks a pin into his buttocks. The scene recalls the story Fox told about his father having been a dentist in Hungary, except that his father allegedly used a red-hot iron on the patient’s back. If broad, physical gags weren’t really Ford’s style, if most everywhere else in the movie the humor is warmer and subtler, Ford wasn’t about to oppose the boss’s creative contribution. Fox authorized his paycheck and believed he could have a great future. Ford, who had turned thirty on February 1, 1924, during location shooting in Nevada, very much wanted that future.

  Although the story framework was far less of Ford’s invention than he eventually claimed, The Iron Horse was still distinctively his own. Through filming and editing choices, he asserted his emerging sophisticated visual style. In depicting the murder of Davy’s father, for instance, the camera stays on the villain Deroux, disguised as a Native American, as he raises an ax over the fallen, ambushed father, but then quickly cuts to the boy’s anguished face. To have lingered on the killer would have glorified the power of the strong over the vulnerable and favored physical action over psychological reaction. Ford’s artistic choice signals that this terrible loss will linger for years as a deep wound demanding vengeance. Indeed, when the adult Davy recognizes Deroux by his mangled hand and beats him to death in a fistfight, the intensity of his rage comes as no surprise.

  Similarly, to introduce the Indians’ mass attacks on the railroad workers, Ford uses the elegant, ominous power of inference rather than blunt representation. One such scene begins with the shadows of the Indians on their horses, weapons in hand, on the side of the train cars. Another shows a single arrow striking the elderly, white-haired “musketeer” Schultz in the back as he works on the railroad. Ford also knew what he wanted from his actors and how to recognize it when he had it. When reunited with Miriam after many years since their childhood together in Springfield, George O’Brien’s Davy looks at her with subtle puzzlement—as if he thinks he recognizes her, but doesn’t dare to hope so—and then, when he hears her name, he looks as if he can’t quite believe the luck. Then, when Miriam introduces Jesson, her father’s engineer, as her fiancé, Davy looks momentarily stunned, but quickly pulls himself together. It’s a spinning kaleidoscope of emotions, and Ford kept O’Brien from overplaying any one of them. A later scene between the two characters also draws strength from subtlety. After confessing to Davy that she loves him rather than Jesson, Miriam looks up at him longingly. Davy hugs her and kisses the top of her head. That’s it, and it’s enough.

  Fox knew he had a hit with The Iron Horse, but for a long while he kept that a secret. The industry had branded Fox Film a “weak sister” among the studios, and he meant to give them a big surprise. For the first time in Fox Film history, a big movie got no advance publicity buildup. A short, prerelease item appeared in Variety in mid-July 1924, misidentifying the movie as The Iron Door and describing it simply as “a tale of the Western plains, with a buffalo stampede.” A few weeks later, when Fox Film announced the 1924–1925 season’s slate of releases—allegedly the greatest achievement in “all the history of public entertainment”—page after page of advertising included not one word about The Iron Horse.

  Then, several days before the premiere at Broadway’s Lyric Theatre on Thursday, August 28, 1924, the Fox publicity machine attacked New York. First, “a veritable landslide of teaser posters of every size and description” appeared on almost every worthwhile billboard in the city, while huge signs announcing The Iron Horse cropped up on all paved roads into New York, and snipes plastered the distances toward New Jersey and Long Island seaside resorts. Next came an overhead campaign. At $1,000 per trip, the studio hired former army airmen to make thirty nighttime flights toting an electric sign that read “Iron Horse” over New York and New Jersey and to make thirty daytime trips skywriting the title in tall letters.

  Behind the scenes, Fox made sure John Ford felt appreciated, giving him a new three-and-a-half-year contract starting at $1,500 weekly and escalating to $2,250 weekly. Fox also invited Ford’s parents to travel from their home in Maine to the New York premiere. Mother and Father Feeney were like cantankerous characters out of a typical Fox movie. Mr. Feeney was a former laborer who drank heavily; Mrs. Feeney was illiterate, but could read numbers well enough to order the most expensive item on the menu as long as someone else was paying. Embarrassed though he would have been to encounter his own parents in such a condition, Fox treated the Feeneys with generous goodwill. He put them up at the Waldorf, had Sheehan take them shopping every day in his Rolls-Royce, and asked them, along with Ford and his wife, Mary
, to stay at the Fox estate in Woodmere the night before the premiere.

  Although Mary Ford marveled at the Fox family’s “sensational” style and “real, real rich kind of living,” Mrs. Feeney grumbled that she wanted to stay in the hotel instead, and complained, “If these Jews think they’re going to make a fuss over me, they’re crazy. I’m not the least bit impressed.” Mr. Feeney had no better manners. At the Fox dinner table, noticing a butler at his elbow with a bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey, he dumped his water glass out into a potted plant, had the butler pour right up to the brim, and then downed the drink in one gulp. Ford said, “I remember Mr. Fox staring at him in disbelief.”

  Still, none of the Fox family showed any hint of disapproval of the two hayseeds. Mary Ford recalled the whole Fox family—Fox, Eva, Mona, and Belle—as “the simplest, sweetest people” who were “getting the bang of their life out of it . . . without being mean about it.” Recalling the incident decades later, Ford described Fox as “a grand man and a great gentleman” who had understood what the trip meant to his parents and who “did everything to make them feel at home.”

  At the premiere, Fox and Eva escorted the Fords and the Feeneys in a limousine to the Lyric Theatre, walked them down a red carpet, and stayed with them throughout the performance, despite a guest list that included not only flashy movie industry celebrities but also the heads of several railroads, New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs, and U.S. senator Royal S. Copeland. After the performance, walking through the usually “dreary and cold” lobby, which the studio had decorated with hundreds of yards of blue and gray silk, Fox paused by a life-size oil painting of Ford and asked Mrs. Feeney, “How do you like your Johnny’s picture?” These were the moments so personally rewarding for Fox: he had helped a young man establish his position in the world and had given the man’s parents a reason to be proud of him. With The Iron Horse, Ford became a first-rank director and began what would turn out to be his mature body of work. As grandson Dan Ford has observed, with The Iron Horse, Ford “found his great theme as a chronicler of the American experience: personal happiness is tied to national progress.”

  Fox’s eleventh-hour publicity strategy worked brilliantly toward two purposes. Restraint from William Fox? People who thought they knew him were no longer quite so sure. Second, having built up no expectations, critics were compelled to evaluate the movie on its own merits. Many were stunned, captivated, and nearly desperate not to let The Iron Horse fall into obscurity. “Certainly a masterpiece,” Motion Picture News advised theater owners. “Laud it to the limit. Get out all the paper possible on it—and tell that it is Fox’s greatest film.” Film Daily echoed, “Here’s one of the sweetest box-office profit-making sure-fire pictures of the season . . . There isn’t any doubt about the commercial value of this.” Most consumer publications agreed, describing the movie as universally appealing. Looking ahead, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle predicted that film history would remember The Iron Horse as “one of the really fine accomplishments in filmcraft.”

  Naturally, there was a naysayer. Life magazine’s Robert E. Sherwood inexplicably bashed The Iron Horse for “frightfully slipshod dramatic construction.” He concluded, “As a whole, the picture makes almost no sense; scenes, episodes and situations . . . are hurled together with utter disregard of continuity . . . It’s all very confusing.”

  Playing exclusively at the 1,406-seat Lyric Theatre, with ticket prices of $1.65, The Iron Horse did uneven business for the first few days, but hit its stride within a week. Soon it was selling out at most performances. By February 1925, some 320,600 people had seen the movie there.

  It was a risk not to send the movie into wide release as soon as it had proved its drawing power. Between the Lyric’s high rental fee and tremendous advertising costs, Fox was at best breaking even there, and the more people who had already seen The Iron Horse in New York, the fewer were left to want to see it there. A drop-off in business at the Lyric would likely flatten enthusiasm among exhibitors around the country, and it was at their theaters that Fox would make his real money. Additionally, at any moment, another spectacular movie might come along and make The Iron Horse look like old news.

  Fox kept faith. Instead of cashing in, he threw more money on the table. On February 21, 1925, he opened The Iron Horse at only one more theater, the 1,800-seat Grauman’s Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, and launched another sensational publicity campaign. No planes with banners buzzed overhead this time, but in the theater’s forecourt, the studio installed the Collis P. Huntington, the Central Pacific’s first locomotive, and nearby positioned an exact replica of Lincoln’s log cabin, which was manned by the look-alike actor who portrayed Lincoln in the movie, former Reno, Nevada, judge Charles E. Bull.

  Master showman Sid Grauman arranged an elaborate stage show “prologue,” with two hundred players, including twenty-five Arapahoe and Shoshone Indians, in ten live acts. Among the performances were a series of tableaux based on Remington paintings; a hoop skirt dance; music by two old-time fiddlers and an accordion player; and the pièce de résistance, the running out onstage of two steam-puffing engines, which stopped about four feet apart while a gold spike was driven into the track between them. Almost every night during the first week, parties honoring the movie were held at the theater. The one hosted by Charlie Chaplin and his sixteen-year-old wife, Lita Grey, drew a particularly large crowd. All this promotion was expensive, but as Fox told a colleague, “[T]o make money, you’ve got to spend it.”

  Fox believed so much in The Iron Horse, the first Fox movie shown in one of Los Angeles’s major new theaters, that he overcame his loathing of public attention and, on opening night at the Egyptian, allowed himself to be introduced to the audience. With Eva in New York and John Ford absent, Fox had escorted Ford’s wife, Mary. For her, it was a magical experience. Decades later she would comment, “If I were told to live those days over again or change them, I wouldn’t have them any different. Things were so great in those days and it isn’t that I was looking at it through the eyes of youth—it was, they were. Highly different. People were real.”

  Real, too, was the money that The Iron Horse brought in at the Egyptian. With two performances daily and tickets priced at $0.50 to $1.50, the first full week’s revenues totaled $26,400. That was roughly twice the theater’s break-even point, and making money wasn’t even the main point of the engagement. Extending excitement to the West Coast was. Month after month, the movie held its altitude. Finally, after seventeen weeks and total patronage of more than 350,000, The Iron Horse had to leave the Egyptian on June 21, 1925, to make room for the June 26 world premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Audiences didn’t want The Iron Horse to go. During the final week, almost every performance sold out, bringing in an impressive $28,370. According to Sid Grauman, The Iron Horse was “[o]ne of the greatest pictures I ever saw” and attracted many people who didn’t normally go to the movies.

  At long last, in the fall of 1925, after a year at the Lyric in New York and having played nowhere else except the Egyptian in Los Angeles, The Iron Horse went into wide release in the United States and overseas. Fox unleashed another advertising blizzard—the total cost would reach $250,000—via magazines, newspapers, radio, airplanes, and balloons. To help exhibitors, Fox Film offered Iron Horse lobby displays, oil paintings, folders, and heralds. These showed up not only in theaters, but also in book, cigar, and drugstores. In Cleveland, a large float was driven though the main streets at night, with spotlights playing on two displays: at the front, a life-size papier-mâché horse painted bronze to resemble iron, and behind it, a log cabin. To attract more studious types, the Cleveland Public Library gave away ten thousand bookmarks advertising The Iron Horse.

  Europe received equally energetic, imaginative promotion. In Paris, Fox publicists took the city by surprise, mentioning not a word about The Iron Horse before hiring men to dress up as porters and sending them to railway and subway stations to distribute two million fake r
ailway tickets advertising the movie. Hotel signs and window cards were also put up throughout the city, and the lobby of the Cameo, where the movie had an exclusive engagement, was decorated as a railway booking office. Maybe they were corny, but the tactics worked. The Iron Horse broke attendance records at the Cameo, which had been operating since 1907.

  Altogether, The Iron Horse grossed an estimated $2–$3 million and made 1925 Fox Film’s most financially successful year yet. Although a few years earlier Over the Hill had come close to that level of profit, it had been essentially a small movie that did big business. The Iron Horse achieved all-around greatness. It epitomized Fox’s ambitions for the future, and by garnering critical acclaim, it reopened the door for him into the forefront of the industry.

  PART III

  THE ONE GREAT

  INDEPENDENT

  1925–1929

  CHAPTER 26

  Renewal

  Courage and Confidence. Throughout the history of the world, courage has inspired confidence. Only by courage—and the confidence it has created—has the world moved forward.

  —FOX FILM CORPORATION AD, APRIL 1926

  Buoyed by the success of The Iron Horse, Fox began a radical transformation of Fox Film. Henceforth, he announced in January 1925, he would make only special features and eliminate all “hokum and unreality” from his movies. Lest anyone wonder how Fox Film was suddenly going to acquire an abundance of good taste, he added that the studio planned to form a “best minds” board of experts—Eugene O’Neill, Edna Ferber, Willa Cather, and New York Times critic Alexander Woollcott were publicly invited to join—to review literary acquisitions.