BY FRED BLOSSER
In
“Union Pacific†(1939), an epic Western produced and directed by Cecil B.
DeMille for Paramount Pictures in flavorful black-and-white, Union Army veteran
Jeff Butler (Joel McCrea) is hired as a troubleshooter by the fledgling Union
Pacific Railroad just after the end of the Civil War. In the 2021 corporate world, his job description
probably would say “Head of Security.†Butler is an engineer by profession, but he’s traded his slide rule (or
whatever engineers used in those days) for a pair of six-shooters. The Union Pacific is laying track westward
from Nebraska to connect in Utah with the Central Pacific, as the latter
proceeds eastward from California. Jeff’s duty is to make sure the Union Pacific stays on schedule, and
that means no malingering or sabotage by the track crew. If the Union Pacific falls behind, the Central
Pacific becomes top dog.
Jeff’s
main problem is shady gambler Sid Campeau (Brian Donlevy), whose portable
saloon travels westward with the train. At each “end of track,†Campeau sets up his bar and poker tables, ready
to move on to the next stop as the rails advance. Unknown to anybody but Campeau and his
associates, the cardsharp has been hired by financier Asa Barrows (Henry
Kolker) to delay progress by getting the workmen drunk, distracted,
disgruntled, and if necessary, dead. Barrows is the lead investor in the Union Pacific, but he schemes to
make even more money by undermining the project behind the scenes. Once the railroad irretrievably falls behind
schedule thanks to Campeau’s mischief, he’ll short-sell his stock before the
news goes out, put the money into the Central Pacific, and reap a windfall when
the rival company’s assets soar. And you
thought that today’s Wall Street cutthroats were unscrupulous.
Piling
on the complications for Jeff, Campeau’s right-hand man is Dick Allen (Robert
Preston), an old buddy from the war. At
first, the two pals are glad to meet up again with the sort of dialogue that
wouldn’t be out of place in a modern bro-mance movie: “Why, I haven’t seen you
since Philadelphia,†Allen says. “No, it
was Washington,†Jeff corrects him. “You
passed out in Philadelphia.†Dick soon
starts to live up to his name, when he and Campeau do their best to make each
“end of track†a permanent end of track.
It
doesn’t help that Dick is sweet on Mollie Monahan (Barbara Stanwyck), the
daughter of the railroad’s senior conductor and its traveling
postmistress. Despite his sleazy
behavior otherwise, he seems serious about truly being in love and wanting to
marry her. But Mollie and Jeff begin to
fall for each other.
To
some degree, “Union Pacific†was a roll of the dice for DeMille and Paramount
when it began pre-production. DeMille’s
last movie, “The Buccaneer†(1938), had barely scraped by with audiences, and
the director himself was in severe post-operative pain from prostate
surgery. For the studio, the $1.2
million budget (over $100 million in today’s dollars) represented a great leap
of faith, especially for a Western. But
it proved to be a worthwhile investment. “Union Pacific†emerged as a box-office hit, earning healthy returns
even after going over schedule and over budget because the exacting DeMille
refused to cut corners. C.B. “had a
horror of cheating the picture, or the audience,†author Scott Eyman noted in
“Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille†(2010). Along with the releases of “Stagecoach,â€
“Dodge City,†“Destry Rides Again,†“Jesse James,†and “Frontier Marshal†that
same year, “Union Pacific†helped reinvigorated Westerns as A-list productions. This success laid the foundation for the
genre’s commercial and critical supremacy in the next two decades. The film must have been great, free publicity
for the actual Union Pacific, comparable to all the free hoopla that Richard
Branson and Jeff Bezos enjoyed this summer from the adulatory media coverage of
their spaceship junkets.
There
was one bump along the way for DeMille, when he approached his friend Gary
Cooper for the Jeff Butler role. Cooper
had headlined DeMille’s popular 1936 Western, “The Plainsman.†In that era when John Wayne was still
struggling to rise from an undistinguished B-movie career (John Ford would
throw him a lifeline with “Stagecoachâ€), Cooper was the go-to star for
Westerns. But Coop was already
contracted for another picture, and McCrea was the happy fallback as the quiet,
capable hero. It was a role that McCrea
more or less would reprise in forty more productions over the next thirty
years. Unlike today’s emotionally fragile
and immature movie heroes, Jeff Butler never once complains about a miserable
childhood or wonders whether he’s cut out for all this.