UNION PACIFIC: Blu-ray (Paramount, 1939) Kino Lorber

The least pretentious of director, Cecil B. DeMille’s mid-career classics (DeMille had been making movies for well over 25-years by the time this opportunity rolled around), Union Pacific (1939) remains a highly enjoyable, wild and woolly yarn, loosely hinged upon the circumstances to culminate in one of America’s most ambitious construction projects of the 19th century, capturing the spirit of the old west, but with a distinct investment in the theatrics of a good ole-fashion adventure story, expertly told by one of cinema’s irrefutable master showman.  Within DeMille’s verve for fiction are neatly wedged a few nuggets of the truth (he even gained permission from Stanford University to borrow the actual ‘golden spike’, used to mark the occasion where the two rail lines met in 1869) – enough, to make the likes of John Ford’s idealized sagebrush Americana blush with shameless admiration. Like most every movie made within that golden epoch of 12 months affectionately known as 1939 – the year, it all came together in the American picture-making biz – Union Pacific is a treasure trove of memorable moments that sets the bar very high indeed for all aspiring film makers. And DeMille here is working with a killer cast, headlined by Hollywood he-hunk, Joel McCrea as forthright law man, Capt. Jeff Butler (Rhett’s cousin, perhaps?), playing second fiddle to top-billed Barbara Stanwyck as Irish lassie, Mollie Monahan. The stars are flanked on all sides by some impressive supporting cast: a dashing and appropriately arrogant, Robert Preston (as, sometimes friend to Jeff and aspiring love interest for Mollie - Dick Allen), character actors, Akim Tamiroff and Lynne Overman (as Jeff’s lovably crude sidekicks, Fiesta and Leach Overmile respectively), and, for genuine baddies, calling upon Paramount’s resident heel, Brian Donlevy as thoroughly unscrupulous, Sid Campeau – a stooge for corrupt banker, Asa M. Barrows (Henry Kolker) and his posse of reprobates, Duke Ring (Robert Barrat) and Jack Corday (Anthony Quinn).  

Set during the epic undertaking of the first transcontinental railroad authorized by President Abraham Lincoln, Union Pacific is chocked full of memorable performances, expertly assembled in a screenplay by Walter DeLeon, C. Gardner Sullivan, and Jesse Lasky Jr. Like all of DeMille’s finest efforts, pedigree is of the utmost importance here; what, with a stunning adaptation of Ernest Haycox’s novel by Jack Cunningham, and uncredited assists from Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, Jeanie Macpherson and Stanley Rauh. There is a lot going on here, and DeMille takes his own sweet time (135 minutes of it to be exact) to allow us to get to truly know these figures beyond their broadly hewn archetypes. Stanwyck’s spitfire is the most unintentionally refreshing, if only because Stanwyck cannot sustain an Irish brogue to save her life and intermittently reverts to the plucky and self-centered determination that got her noticed by fans in the first place.  There isn’t much to McCrea’s lean and rugged man of action either, except that McCrea is able to transfer much of himself, enough to generate some empathy and enthusiasm for an otherwise heroic cardboard cutout of love’s young kiss.  Preston’s dandy and Donlevy’s brute are the most interesting – with an ever-so-slight homoerotic devotion that turns murderous after Dick throws Sid over, transgressing to the nobler side of Jeff’s enduring friendship…and paying for this fatal virtue with his own life. There is some truly bromantic chemistry going on here, especially between Jeff and Dick, shown to have been the best of war buddies a few short years earlier. But now, the boys are on opposite sides of a perilous crusade to open up the American west.  

DeMille’s zeal to fill the screen with action, including a reckless horse race across rocky terrain in the middle of the night after the train carrying the company’s payload is robbed by Dick and his cohorts, is more crudely cleaved heroism, especially when compared to Ford’s fantastically finessed effort of the year - Stagecoach.  But DeMille proves yet again, as though proof were needed, he knows how to handle large-scale melodrama and adventure with one fell swoop of command from his mighty hand. In a year teeming in such a monumental embarrassment of riches, to include no less than 5 westerns in competition (Dodge City, Stagecoach, Destry Rides Again, Frontier Marshal and The Oklahoma Kid), Union Pacific carries the cache of a DeMille picture, both in girth and budget, with invested pride of workmanship. And lest we remember, Joel McCrea – not John Wayne - was actually the bigger box office draw in 1939. After an iconic main title with the descending credits laid across a seemingly endless stretch of train track pointing into the distant horizon (a sequence said to have inspired the main titles for 1977’s Star Wars), we are presented with a thumbnail outline of the great American venture – to connect the American east and west coasts. This was Lincoln’s dream – alas, one he did not live to see. In the President’s absence, Congress debates the validity of such a costly endeavor with opportunist, Asa Barrows conspiring to profit from the Union Pacific’s failure by obstructing it. To this end, Barrows strikes a bargain with ruthless, Sid Campeau, to chronically detour the men from their efforts by providing them with outposts where they can lose all their hard-earned monies to booze, hookers and gambling.

One naïve enough to believe he can win at Sid’s blackjack tables is Paddy O'Rourke (Regis Toomey), whose only real ambition is to earn enough money to pay for the Atlantic passage of his Irish sweetheart, Nora so they might be wed. Knowing Paddy to be a good man and pure of heart, the train conductor’s daughter, Mollie Monahan cautions against the gamble. Alas, fate intervenes when, in a heated game of cards, Paddy is deliberately set up, then gunned down by one of Sid’s men, Cordray.  As he lays dying on the floor in Sid’s saloon, Mollie fabricates a letter from Nora and pretends to read of Nora’s everlasting love and devotion to comfort Paddy before he passes.  Sent to oversee the successful completion of the Union Pacific, Jeff Butler is privy to Paddy’s murder and forces Cordray to reveal to all that Paddy had the winning hand all along. Now, Jeff, in addition to setting up a collection for Paddy’s widow, also claims the sizable winnings on the table in Paddy’s name, all of it to be sent back home to Nora. Underestimating Jeff’s skills with a gun, Cordray attempts to draw on Jeff while his back is turned. Instead, Jeff sees his attacker’s reflection in a mirror, turns and shoots Cordray dead, thereby avenging Paddy’s murder as Sid and the rest of his cronies look on. So, Jeff Butler will not be so easy to subdue.

When Sid attempts to bribe the men with free drinks at the bar, Jeff and one of his bodyguards, Leach counteract with a claim of having discovered gold nuggets at the end of the line. Much to Sid’s chagrin, the ruse is successful in getting the men back on the train to continue their efforts. Meanwhile, Mollie has begun to warm to Jeff’s virtue, despite having already awkwardly accepted a ring from Dick, who desperately desires her as his wife. Alas, Dick has chosen to run with Sid, despite his former allegiances to Jeff whom he continues to secretly admire and respect. As the back-breaking efforts to complete the line continue, the men become disgruntled at not having received their promised pay. Dissention between the rail’s curmudgeonly foreman, who attempts to insight a revolt, and Jeff, are successfully thwarted. Meanwhile, the edict of Gen. Dodge (Francis McDonald) forces Asa to send the necessary funds on ahead to pay the men, lead to a daring ‘last ditch’ effort by Sid to derail morale by sending Dick and his cohorts to rob the pay train before it can reach its destination. Having heard of this plot, Leach, Fiesta and Jeff forms a posse who race against time to prevent the inevitable. Too late, they come across the pay train emptied of its cash, but spy Dick and his men riding off with the monies. Jeff orders his posse, each to pick a rider and go after them, with Jeff unknowingly pursuing Dick back to the outpost.

In a frantic race, Dick tosses the payload through Mollie’s window at the post office box car, then changes clothes, forcing her to lie for him when Jeff arrives to investigate the scene of the crime. More out of love for Jeff than devotion to Dick, Mollie commits to the tall tale, hoping to spare Jeff his life as Sid and his boys arrive to reclaim the cash. Eventually, Dick sees the error of his ways and elects to reform. As the late President Lincoln’s fantastic plan to bridge the nation in transportation draw to a close, Mollie resigns herself to wed the man to whom she earlier committed to with a ring. Jeff nobly resists the urge to intervene. But the train’s photo-op is intruded upon by Sid who skulks about, determined to put a bullet in Jeff before the day is through. Mistaking Dick’s approaching shadow for Jeff, Sid takes dead aim and murders his cohort instead. Jeff discovers Dick dying alone and comforts him as he expires, unaware Sid is preparing to murder him too. Instead, Sid is shot to death by Leach who, along with Fiesta, have been protecting Jeff all along. Jeff rejoins Mollie with the presumption they are now free to wed each other. The image dissolves into that of a then modern-age locomotive racing across the same rails laid with the blood, sweat and efforts of these brave pioneers – putting context to their suffrage and ever-lasting perspective to this age of progress.   

Like most great technological endeavors of the previous century, today we take the Union Pacific railway for granted. But consider the monumental ambition here, to build a viable mode of transportation across two-thirds of the continental United States, through some of the most inhospitable and rugged terrain anywhere in the world. Connecting California, then only accessible by stagecoach, to the East, by crossing hundreds of miles of desolate landscape, populated in wild animals and Indians, traversing perilous mountain-scapes, deep rivers and parched deserts without the benefit of modern construction methods to expedite the process, the Union Pacific was truly a landmark in an age now that fails to even recognize it as such. The men who undertook to see this marvel through to completion, and their pioneer women and families who followed them, setting up temporary outposts in their nomadic migration from one end of the continent to the other, did so with no more assurances or even confidence than blind faith in their task at hand and the exhilarating belief, theirs was a destiny to alter the course of human endeavor for all time, and, for the betterment of all. DeMille’s movie manages to capture some, if not all, of this epic ‘manifest destiny’ quality.

Immediately following the completion of the movie, DeMille and his cast marked their own cross-country pilgrimage to promote the picture, creating a stir of 250,00 onlookers in Omaha, Nebraska – or approximately twice the city’s natural population, necessitating the calling out of the National Guard for crowd control. Attending the Golden Spike Celebration in true Hollywood style, DeMille, Stanwyck and McCrea were mobbed at the station and treated like royalty thereafter with a slew of parades, radio broadcasts and banquets to promote the picture. While Selznick’s magnum opus, Gone with the Wind may have had a staggeringly impressive premiere in Atlanta, Georgia, DeMille’s shameless fanfare for Union Pacific was easily the grandest and most widely covered event of the year.  In a year of titans, DeMille and Paramount were determined not to be outdone. Viewed today, Union Pacific remains quite unlike any other western of its time, crammed with melodrama, action and adventure par excellence. The picture was, in fact, awarded the very first Palme D’Or at Cannes, eclipsing such fine contenders as Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Wizard of Oz.

It is one of Hollywood’s ironies that Union Pacific, unlike some of the year’s other triumphs mentioned herein, has not maintained its staying power during the interim. Precisely why its glory and impact have withered with age remains a mystery. Fair enough, it premiered in a year swamped by exceptional entertainment. Even better, Union Pacific, unlike the other westerns in direct competition with it in 1939, was a dramatic – if highly fabricated – re-telling of a pivotal moment in America’s nation-building progress. In focusing on the strife and struggles of a small group of rugged individuals determined to do their part in this vast undertaking, DeMille personalized an event into an intimate tale of survival to which anyone could relate. And he did so, while maintaining the mythology of that robust and rugged masculinity his audiences had come to expect from the western genre in a narrative wholly invested in the conflict of personal integrity pitted against avarice for profit.  To suggest Union Pacific as nothing more substantial than DeMille’s first-rate challenge at a second-rate soap opera is to diminish its quality significantly, and, in fact, unfairly. And too, one must sincerely admire DeMille in all his ‘DeMillian’ trademarks and flourishes, an epic Indian war party attack, two train derailments – one, staged in pulverized gypsum and asbestos, subbing in for a hellish winter blizzard – and the large-scale set pieces for which Paramount spared virtually no expense. Every dime of the picture’s $1.45 million budget is up there on the screen, with DeMille painting his big, bold canvas of the American West against foremost sentiment for the men and women who had actually lived it.

Subtlety was never DeMille’s thing. So, there are plenty of patriotic, flag-waving gestures to go around. But Union Pacific is not as bombastic as some of the director’s other movies and certainly, it never veers into the sort of pretentious or pontificating spectacle for which some of DeMille’s otherwise best known, and most beloved movies are well informed. If anything, time has proven DeMille to be one of the most iconic traditionalists in American cinema – a moniker, he likely would have taken to heart and sincerely with pride. Like P.T. Barnum before him, DeMille’s desire to put on a good show precedes his passion for the work, or perhaps, put more aptly, informs the decisions he makes to create drama in tandem with spectacle, resulting in a pure, sprawling and immersive experience for his audience. And lest we also remember, Union Pacific was the second-highest grossing movie of the year, tying MGM’s musical, Babes in Arms. A colossal effort, Union Pacific stands today as DeMille’s monument to American progress. Not without its flaws, but easily overlooked when compared to the myriad of delights it provides, Union Pacific is one of the finest efforts, not only from DeMille, but Hollywood in general.  In a year still considered the greatest in movie history, no small accomplishment for sure, and one the entire cast could take satisfaction in having committed to celluloid – a near peerless milestone of the Western genre.

Union Pacific arrives on Blu-ray via Kino Lorber’s alliance with Universal Home Video, the present-age custodians of the pre-fifties Paramount library. Running true to form, the transfer here is derived from elements that have not seen a remaster since the late 1990’s. Mercifully, Union Pacific was afforded some care back then, when Uni released a box set of DeMille movies. So, the efforts here, while definitely in need of an upgrade, have, at the very least, found their way to hi-def in a semi-admirable quality that, for the most part, should not disappoint. The image toggles between sequences that are expertly realized with minimal age-related artifacts, some good solid contrast and film grain appearing very indigenous to its source, and other moments when it all appears as though a dupe has been inserted, resulting in anemic contrast, amplified grain, and more wear and tear than anticipated. Overall, Union Pacific fairs better than much of the vintage stuff Kino has been allowing to pass for quality of late. No real complaints here, although, a 4K remaster is definitely long overdue. The 1.0 DTS audio is adequate and nicely purposed, with crisp dialogue and no hiss or pop. Extras are limited to a rather lackluster audio commentary from historians, Dr. Eloise Ross and Paul Anthony Nelson. I will simply go on record to state I am generally not a fan of these dry academic commentaries, arising from the need to distort the past by ascribing present-day philosophical debates to vintage fare from a loftier than thou perspective that diminishes the contributions of yore as somehow quaintly out of touch and naïve. A movie from 1939 cannot hope to reflect the present philosophical perspective…thank heaven (and not just for little girls!).  There’s also a badly worn theatrical trailer on tap here. Bottom line: Union Pacific is a DeMillian fantasia for the eyes and heart. The Blu-ray is about two points above average. What can I say? As long as Uni believes it can get away with offering the bare minimum, they are going to keep pumping out the oldies in tired old 1080p transfers. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

1

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