German émigré director Fritz Lang seemed comfortable out west, and this movie followed quickly on the heels of his Return of Frank James. Today these films seem a little tame, and this tale of the building of the telegraph line between Omaha, Nebraska, and Salt Lake City, Utah, suffers from being undercast there's a particularly uncharismatic lead in Robert Young, a phlegmatic Randolph Scott as a reforming outlaw and a notably uninteresting leading lady in Virginia Gilmore. But the set pieces are done with bravura and the cinematography is ravishing. Not to be confused with Cecil B DeMille's better (and black-and-white) Union Pacific.

When Edward Creighton leads the construction of the Western Union to unite East with West, he hires a Western reformed outlaw and a tenderfoot Eastern surveyor. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in 2000.