John Ford's _The Iron Horse_ (1924)

film is about the construction of American]'s first transcontinental railroad. It depicts Irish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants, as well as African Americans, as the men who did the backbreaking work that made this feat possible. The primary villain is an unscrupulous businessman who masquerades as a renegade Cheyenne. It culminates with the scene of driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869. There is a note in the title before this scene that the two original locomotives from the 1869 event are used in the film, although this is false - both engines (Union Pacific No. 119 and Jupiter) were scrapped before 1910. Main stars were George O'Brien and Madge Bellamy. A 1924 American silent Western film directed by John Ford and produced by Fox Film. It was a major milestone in Ford's career, and his lifelong connection to the western film genre. It was Ford's first major film, in part because the hastily planned production went over budget, as Fox was making a hurried response to the success of another studio's western. Among the extras used in the Central Pacific sequences were several Chinese men playing coolies who worked on the railroad. They were in fact retired Central Pacific Railroad employees who had helped build the first transcontinental railroad through the Sierras, who came out to participate in the filming as a lark.[3] In December 2011, The Iron Horse was deemed ""culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. In choosing the film, the Registry said that The Iron Horse ""introduced to American and world audiences a reverential, elegiac mythology that has influenced many subsequent Westerns."" The film's importance was recognized by the American Film Institute in the 2008 AFI's 10 Top 10, where it was nominated in the Western category. Credit: Public Domain Movie - https://publicdomainmovie.net/