The building of the railroad takes a back seat to an uncommonly polite love triangle between feisty Irish lass Barbara Stanwyck, morally questionable charmer Robert Preston and noble hero Joel McCrea. Wayne and O'Hara might have been a better fit for two of those parts but Stanwyck and McCrea will do. It's full of neat little touches: slimy bad guy Brian Donlevy's habit of dipping his cigar in his liquor, for example, and Preston tapping smoke rings from a box. Good fun, but it peaks 15 minutes too early.
Review of Union Pacific
