"Union Pacific" is a very good Western movie with a top Hollywood cast of the day. It has action, adventure and romance. It combines fiction with fact in telling the story of building the Union Pacific Railroad. Congress had authorized the Transcontinental Railroad in 1862 to connect the existing eastern U.S. rail network with the Pacific Coast. The project was 1,912 miles long and was built between 1863 and 1869 by three private railroad companies. At 1,085 miles, the UP was the longest and most difficult part of the "Overland Route," as it soon would become known. It ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to West of Ogden, Utah. It crossed the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. The Western Pacific Railroad built 132 miles of track from Oakland to Sacramento, and the Central Pacific Railroad built 690 miles of track from Sacramento to Promontory Point, Utah. It was in a race with the UP to get to Ogden. As the movie shows, the UP got there first and the two lines met at Promontory Summit, 66 miles northwest of Salt Lake City. A number of movies - especially Westerns, have scenes with trains or building rail lines in their plot. But, "Union Pacific" is the only film in which the plot centers on the building of a railroad. It shows men laying ties and rails, putting up and tearing down makeshift towns, and dealing with struggles. Those included terrain, weather, train followers, and plots to delay or undermine the rail lines. This movie is based on a 1936 novel, "Trouble Shooter," by Western fiction author Ernest Haycox. Movie fans will be familiar with his work from the 1939 blockbuster and Oscar winner, "Stagecoach." It was based on another 1936 Haycox novel, "Stage to Lordsburg." This film mixes fictional characters with real people. Chief among the latter is General Grenville Dodge, played by Francis McDonald. Dodge had earned an engineering degree in 1850 and settled in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He served as a Major General in the Union Army during the Civil War. Among his many achievements was his pioneering use of military intelligence. Pres. Abraham Lincoln asked Dodge to help build the Transcontinental Railroad. He resigned from the Army to be chief engineer for the Union Pacific. Dodge also served in congress and later helped build a number of other railroads. Other real people portrayed are Oakes Ames (played by Willard Robertson), Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Joseph Crehan), Thomas Durant (John Marston, uncredited), and California Gov. Leland Stanford (Gus Glassmire). The rest of the cast are fictional. The film has some big name stars and top supporting actors of the day. These all give top performances. Barbara Stanwyck is very believable with her Irish accent as Mollie Monahan. Joel McCrea is Jeff Butler, Robert Preston is Dick Allen and Brian Donlevy is Sid Campeau. Anthony Quinn has a small part as Cordray, and a top supporting cast includes Akim Tamiroff as Fiesta, Lynne Overman as Leach Overmile, Henry Kolker as Asa Barrows, Regis Toomey as Paddy O'Rourke, Lon Chaney Jr. as Dollarhide, and Ward Bond as a track-layer. The film has a cast of hundreds with many more regular supporting actors in bit roles. Most of them are as gandy dancers - the men who worked on the crews that laid the rails. As the movie shows, the Union Pacific was built mostly by Irish immigrants. The Central Pacific railroad that met the UP in Utah was built mostly with Chinese labor. In other parts of the country, men of other ethnic groups formed the main work forces that built the railroads. The film doesn't show it, but a special crew from both railroads was chosen to complete the link up at Promontory Point. That team of Irish and Chinese gandy dancers took just 12 hours to lay the final 10 miles of track. Today, the Union Pacific is the largest railroad in the U.S. It operates 14 hump yards where trains are assembled for routing to all corners of the U.S. and Canada. The Bailey Yard at North Platte, Nebraska, is the world's largest hump yard. It has 200 tracks and marshals a daily average of 139 trains and 14,000 cars. Tourists can watch the operation from the Golden Spike Tower at the visitors center. The Union Pacific Museum is located in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River from Omaha. In 1936, the Union Pacific built the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho. It sold Sun Valley in 1964.The site of the joining of the UP and CP railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, is now the Golden Spike National Historic Site. The park has a museum with actual size replicas of the 1865 trains that met there -- the UP No. 119 and Central Pacific No. 60, "Jupiter." The park re-enacts the Golden Spike ceremony weekly on Saturdays from spring to fall. The main operating railroad line long ago was relocated south of the Great Salt Lake. It cut the length of the route by 43 miles and took out some curves and hills. Although the driving of the Golden Spike was attributed to California Gov. Leland Stanford at the time, he and the next person both missed the spike as the movie shows. The character of Ames in the movie is fictional, but may be based on one or more real characters. Apparently, the real pounder of the Golden Spike will never be known. Maybe it was a gandy dancer. In "Union Pacific," Cecil B. DeMille gives us first-rate entertainment. It's a good Western, adventure and romantic film with a look at history that people young and old should enjoy. P.S. - I climbed poles and dug bootlegs for the UP one year after Army service before heading off to college.

This is a big budget extravaganza about the building of the transcontinental railroad. It was probably a superior product for its time, but is badly dated in a number of ways by today's standards. Here are some positives: I like the basic theme. It 's a mostly unapologetic, upbeat Manifest Destiny movie. The energy and optimism are refreshing after growing up on revisionist Westerns. Good Civil War themes Classic "frenemy" relationship between Joel McCrea and Robert Preston is well executed. Joel McCrea is a very likable leading man. However, Robert Preston steals the movie, nailing the "lovable bounder" role. Solid supporting performances by Brian Donlevy and a very young Anthony Quinn. Now for the negatives: The plot and characterizations are overly melodramatic. Both protagonists and antagonists are strictly one-dimensional "Dudley Dooright" and "Snidely Whiplash" caricatures. The romantic subplot is excruciatingly corny and takes up too much of the movie. Barbara Stanwyk has just about the worst fake Irish accent I've ever heard. For all the money they spent, there are way to many cheap looking scenes of actors in the studio with an obvious outdoor film running behind them. Although typical for its time, the way Indian and Mexican characters are used as comic relief is offensive. It's way too long. There are numerous plot holes not worth detailing.

UNION PACIFIC is one Cecil B. DeMille film that could have used 1939's Technicolor to tell the sprawling story of the pioneers who built the railroads that united east and west. Nevertheless, DeMille does get across the enormous amount of work involved in building the rails while a lot of skullduggery was going on behind the scenes to prevent a team of workers to reach the midpoint first.JOEL McCREA is the perfect western hero for DeMille's story and gives his usual easy performance as the enforcer who has to keep the villains from halting progress on the rails. BRIAN DONLEVY makes a perfect heel and ROBERT PRESTON shows genuine charm and gives a double-layered performance as McCrea's longtime pal caught under the influence of the bad guys who want to cause havoc. REGIS TOOMEY is underused in a very brief role as an ill-fated Irish rail worker.BARBARA STANWYCK gives her Irish accent a good try and, while not always successful, delivers a very likable performance as the post office gal along for the ride. ANTHONY QUINN has a brief supporting role as a badman, but the most colorful support comes from AKIM TAMIROFF as Fiesta, the man with the whip, and LYNNE OVERMAN, both playing McCrea's scruffy bodyguards. And boy, does he need them! EVELYN KEYES has one line and disappears. But DeMille keeps track of all his extras, using them effectively in all the big mob scenes both indoor and out.Again, Technicolor was still new in 1939 but GONE WITH THE WIND was using seven Technicolor cameras and DeMille probably had no choice but to film in B&W. Let's just say, this is the kind of story that cried for Technicolor which may have made some of the process shots less noticeable for backgrounds shot in a studio.DeMille's tendency to let his films run over two hours is present here. At least twenty minutes or more could easily have been cut to keep the story in a tighter mode.For DeMille fans, definitely worth seeing.

In addition to his talents as a director, as a producer Cecil B. DeMille had a knack for simultaneously jumping on board the latest fad, and finding a niche that only he could fill. Union Pacific takes advantage of the 1939 Western revival, but while pictures like Stagecoach, Jesse James and Dodge City were still moderately-budgeted affairs, DeMille fulfils his obligation to make an epic Western, with thousands of extras, pyrotechnics and a two hour-plus runtime.DeMille may have been a savvy trend follower, but this didn't make him versatile as a director. What is particularly striking about Union Pacific, and indeed all of DeMille's Westerns, is that it does not show off the landscape. Most of the action takes place inside railway carriages or crowded gambling dens, and whenever the wilderness is glimpsed it seems merely coincidental, and is never breathtaking or evocative. Even in the handful of outdoor scenes, it appears DeMille only feels comfortable if he can build a wall of extras. But then again, choreography of crowds is part and parcel of DeMille's style, serving not only as a backdrop but as a part of storytelling method. Take for example the opening scene at the senate. While the anti-railroad speaker is talking, people mill about distractingly, as if discrediting his words. Then when Dodge speaks everyone in the background sits still, encouraging us to focus purely on him.While most of DeMille's silent pictures were penned by the brilliantly demented Jeanie Macpherson, for his sound features he had a revolving committee of untalented hacks. Union Pacific had no less than four credited screenwriters and three uncredited contributors, none of whom was especially prestigious, and the result is as dull as, if not duller than the average DeMille screenplay of this period. Unusually though it makes a few attempts at poignancy, most notably the scene in which Regis Toomey ("Paddy") gets shot. But what scuppers this scene as a genuine tearjerker is not the way DeMille shoots it, which is fairly sensitive, but its handling in the script. For one thing, there has not been enough establishment of this character and thus no emotional backdrop, and secondly Barbara Stanwyck's cod-poetic dialogue is corny even by 1930s standards.By and large though, DeMille's aim is as usual to dazzle and excite us, not to make us laugh or cry. Throughout his career he seldom dealt with emotional material, and here he shoots the dramatic scenes with functionality to give clarity to the story. With the increasingly sprawling narratives of the pictures he was now making, it was necessary to introduce little devices to help us keep track of the secondary characters, an example here being Brian Donlevy dipping his cigars in whiskey.As to the cast, DeMille always appears to have chosen actors for having the right look rather than bags of talent. Joel McCrea fits in with the pattern of handsome-yet-rugged types that made the lead men in DeMille's 1936-1947 output. Usually it would be Gary Cooper, and like Coop McCrea is by no means a bad actor, it's just that he requires a director who was a good acting coach to set him off. Barbara Stanwyck is a notch better, and she emotes well, but her attempt at an Irish accent and demeanour is grating. While there are some great names among the supporting cast, all of them are sadly below par here.Perhaps more than anything, Union Pacific fails because it does not really capture the spirit of the Western. Aside from DeMille's not making the most of the scenery, you just don't get a feel of the pioneer life. It doesn't make us believe that its characters ever had to camp out under the stars or came home covered in the dust of the plains. While some historical arenas were natural DeMille territory – Judea, ancient Rome, the Caribbean in the golden age of piracy – the old west is one he should have left alone.