Denver & Rio Grande

Director: Byron Haskin Byron Haskin

Overview

The Denver and the Rio Grande is one of two rival railroad lines, pitted in a race across the Rockies. Whoever arrives at their destination first will win a valuable contract. Edmond O'Brien is chief engineer of the D & RG, while Sterling Hayden is the less reputable man at the throttle for the Canyon City and San Juan line. The climax involves a head-on crash between two actual trains, a fact that earned the film plenty of press coverage back in 1951. Director Byron Haskin keeps things moving so rapidly that we scarcely have time to ponder the script's many cliches.

Product Details

Release Date:	05/29/2012
UPC:	0887090040105
Original Release:	1951
Rating:	NR
Source:	Olive
Region Code:	1
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono]
Language:	English
Time:	1:30:00
Sales rank:	25,579

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Edmond O'Brien	Jim Vesser
Sterling Hayden	McCabe
Dean Jagger	Gen. William J. Palmer
Lyle Bettger	Johnny Buff
J. Carrol Naish	Harkness
ZaSu Pitts	Jane
Tom Powers	Sloan
Robert Barrat	Haskins,Haskins
Paul Fix	Engineer Monyhan
Don Haggerty	Bob Nelson
James Burke	Sheriff Masters
Kasey Rogers	Linda Prescott
Frank Gruber	Composer
Paul Sawtell	Composer

Technical Credits

Frank Gruber

Byron Haskin	Director
Nat Holt	Producer
Frank Gruber	Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

This outdoor adventure is the kind of release through which movie companies in the postwar world tried to pull audiences into theaters, giving them something they weren't getting on television -- Technicolor filming, a rousing (though surprisingly restrained) orchestral score, and a big-name cast, including Edmond O'Brien, Dean Jagger, J. Carrol Naish, and Sterling Hayden. It's a couple of years too early for anamorphic widescreen (i.e. CinemaScope), which would probably have made it look like as important a movie as it was trying to be on its relatively modest budget, but it has all of the other proper ingredients. Director Byron Haskin uses his knack for photographic tricks even during the opening credits to keep the viewer entertained from the get-go, and the rich color photography by Ray Rennahan takes care of a lot of the rest. Add on a very physical -- yet also surprisingly internalized -- performance by Edmond O'Brien as the misunderstood hero of the piece, and you've got something that favorably recalls such earlier epics of this sort as John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924) and Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific (1939), even if it lacks the sheer onscreen boldness of either of those two movies. The cast is good enough so that they didn't need much help from the director, and as a heroine with a misplaced sense of values, Laura Elliot (better known today as Kasey Rogers) is more than pretty enough and a good enough actress to handle the role. Additionally, there are a pair of colorful performances by ZaSu Pitts and Paul Fix in secondary but important roles that are a lot of fun to watch. Still, for all of that, this is very much a director's picture, as Haskin and editor Stanley E. Johnson keep the action moving briskly enough so that one scarcely has time to dwell on the cliches in Frank Gruber's screenplay. Coupled with some beautiful outdoor shots, spectacular action sequences involving a pair of locomotives, and solid performances at the core, this is a surprisingly rewarding movie for its 89-minute running time (complete with an opening plug for the modern Denver & Rio Grande line) -- think of it as a three-course version of DeMille's six-course Union Pacific.