The Iron Horse

(John Ford, US 1924, 131 min., 35mm)

Silent Tuesdays. Heralded as one of the most important silent westerns, John Ford’s first big-budget film covers the tumultuous time in the early 1860s just as Abraham Lincoln signed the bill for a transcontinental railroad. Ford gives the audience a break from the ordinary white hat/black hat westerns; instead of gunfights and saloons, he surprises us with a human drama and offers us a window into the past of the people who lived and carried out Manifest Destiny. Live piano by Philip C. Carli. Special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.