Union Pacific (film)

Union Pacific is a 1939 American dramatic western film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea. Based on the novel Trouble Shooter by Western fiction author Ernest Haycox, the film is about the building of the railroad across the American West.

Union Pacific was released in 1939 two months after John Fords Stagecoach, which film historians consider responsible for transforming the Hollywood Western from a mostly low budget, B film affair. Wheeler M. Dixon, for example, notes that after the appearance of these two films Union Pacific and Stagecoach, the western was something worthy of adult attention and serious criticism, and therefore a yardstick against which all westerns have been subsequently measured.DeMilles film indeed took the genre to a new level, considering issues of national unity in an engaging and entertaining manner at a time when nationalism was an increasing public concern. Michael Coyne accordingly characterizes Union Pacific as a technological nationlinking endeavor in his book The Crowded Prairie American National Identity In the Hollywood Western. The spirit of unification in the film parallels the industrial boom that brought the United States out of the Great Depression at the onset of World War II, and, although the U.S. would not become involved in the war until 1941, the films emphasis on national unity typifies the nationalistic sentiment that would become much stronger once the country was at war. ........

Source: Wikipedia