RetroClips

This was John Ford's first big-budget epic, made when he was still in his twenties, and Fox threw real resources at it: thousands of extras, cavalry, Chinese and Irish laborers, herds of buffalo, and two replica locomotives built to match the original Jupiter and No. 119 engines down to the rivets. Ford shot much of it on location in the Nevada desert in brutal winter conditions, and the finished film helped define the Western epic as a genre a full generation before Ford's own Stagecoach.