Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Although it could be described as a poor man's variant of De Mille's spectacular "Union Pacific" with all the action scaled down to just the one area of conflict, this is nevertheless an engaging western with solid performances from Sterling Hayden as the get-it-done hero, Barton MacLane as the mildly resentful sidekick and Reed Hadley as the villain of the piece. The movie also offers a rare chance to see the lovely Eve Miller in a lead role. As written, the characters are little more than stereotypes, but the players make them sufficiently engaging to keep our attention focused. In the support cast, Douglas Fowley comes across forcefully as a vicious henchman. James Griffith is introduced into the script with some fanfare, but his talents are then largely wasted in what turns out to be a rather small role. Myron Healey and Clayton Moore, I didn't spot at all! Ray Nazarro has directed with competence and even a bit of style. The action scenes are very capably handled indeed, although it's possible they were directed by an uncredited specialist. Railroad buffs will certainly get something out of the movie too.This movie is currently available from more than a dozen DVD distributors. At least three different prints are on offer. One of them is absolutely superb and is most certainly by far the best Cinecolor offering available today. The other prints, alas, vary from just acceptable to absolutely lousy. (In my collection, the superb print is on a Flashback DVD).

The Civil War is just about to start. In Bleeding Kansas, the government is trying to get the Kansas Pacific Railroad built in order to link its western forts with the east. The Confederate sympathizers are less than eager to see this accomplished. The US Army decides to send out one engineer in civilian clothes to see if he can straighten things out a bit. That would be Sterling Hayden, who looks so big compared to everyone else in the movie that it's possible to imagine him filling a box car all by himself.In charge of the now-stuck railroad in Kansas is beefy, blustering, Barton MacLane, who resents becoming subordinate to Hayden. MacLane's theatrical bellowing had a place in the rough action movies of ten years earlier. But here, the writers have burdened him with a daughter he loves. She can't act but he loves her anyway. Once in a while he chucks her under the chin and tries to smile at her, but one can almost hear the creaking of long-unused facial muscles.The story is rambunctious, headlong. Hayden is determined to get that railroad built, although the suave villain, Reed Hadley of the sonorous baritone, does everything possible to stop him, including requisitioning some artillery from the nascent Confederate Army.But if it's never boring, it's never original either. All the men dress alike: dark cowboy hats, checkered shirts, unbuttoned vests, black boots, and low-slung holsters. I don't know why all the men in these routine Westerns have to wear vests but they do. I counted 246 cowboys and 213 of them were wearing unbuttoned vests. That's 86.58536 percent of the men, all wearing unbuttoned vests. They wear neckerchiefs too, and gloves.Towards the end there is a terrific fist fight between hero Hayden and villain Hadley, and each fist lands smack on each jaw with a loud thud.Well, does the railroad finally get built, you ask? And well you might. No. The railroad does not get built. As a result, the western forts are severed from the battles in the east, the Confederate States of America win the war, and we are all reduced to eating hoppin' john and hush puppies.

"Kansas Pacific" is a poor, generic, low-budget Western. It stars actor Sterling Hayden as a Union soldier tasked with protecting the Kansas Pacific Railway from Confederate attacks. The complex, parasitic relationship between Union forces and Industrialists - the army essentially protected northern business cartels - isn't examined, but the film does contain several lovely shots of a grand steam engine, which is unusual, as the film was produced by Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, a Poverty Row "studio" renowned for its unwillingness to spend money. Today the film's mostly forgotten. Sterling Hayden completists may find it interesting.2/10 - Worth one viewing.

In this well made western, the builders of the railroad have a problem: the civil war will start at any moment, and the sympathizers of the south will do everything they can to sabotage it. After many incidents they go to Washington to ask for the army to help them, but as the war had not started, they send only one man:Sterling Hayden, and he sure knows how to deal with it. Very entertaining, worth seeing for anybody who likes westerns