Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Union Pacific (Paramount) is constructed, from sandbox to coupling pins, of cinematic materials as standard as those that went into the railroad it celebrates. Its most dramatic sequence is a new version of Thomas Alva Edison's 1903 production, The Great Train Robbery, the first story-telling picture ever made. Union Pacific also has: an Indian massacre; a pursuit on horseback; a race across a burning bridge; an old-fashioned triangle plot of sacrifice and misunderstanding. But when, like its subject, it triumphantly ends its journey at Utah's Promontory Point, it has carried a full payload...
...Union Pacific reminds veteran cinemaddicts of many another picture, that is not strange. Paramount's 1,200th picture, it was produced and directed by the same man who made its first (The Squaw Man) 26 years ago. Union Pacific is the 65th picture Cecil Blount DeMille has directed, the 212th he has produced. Some signs that Producer-Director DeMille, who at 58 still affects the leather puttees and riding breeches of his salad days, is still going strong...
Typically DeMille in its lavishness, Union Pacific officially cost Paramount "more than a million dollars," though it did not, despite Hollywood wags, cost more than the railroad itself. DeMille budgets are the result of an overmastering passion for detail and a policy of shooting everything in sight. Of the 205,000 feet of film exposed for Union Pacific, DeMille and his cutter, Anne Bauchens, threw away all but 12,158. On the set DeMille manipulates his mobs through a special public-address system. When unit directors go to remote locations, he stays in Hollywood, keeps in constant touch by telephone...
...stores and bars were flimflammed with pioneer signs and doodads. The school board decreed two Golden Spike holidays. Omaha's Roman Catholic Bishop James Hugh Ryan dispensed his flock from eating fish on Friday. Fearing that its press-agentry would be submerged in the civic celebrations, Paramount loaded Barbara Stanwyck and some of Union Pacific's cast (but not Joel McCrea, under contract to jealous and immovable Producer Samuel Goldwyn) on a train which triumphantly journeyed from Los Angeles, was mobbed even at unscheduled stops along its 1,800-mile route by exuberant crowds, many of whom sported...
Back Door to Heaven (Odessco Productions, Paramount release) is an awkward attempt to crash the back door of the cinema industry. It is notable as the first effort of a new producing company headed by Bernard Steele and Stanley Odium (son of Investment Truster Floyd Bostwick Odium, whose Atlas Corp. has a large stake in Radio-Keith-Orpheum and who reportedly put up part of the $350,000 it cost to make the picture in Astoria...