Photoplay (December 1926) declared: “Here is a natural drama so powerful, it completely overshadows every living thing.” The Winning of Barbara Worth was adapted from Harold Bell Wright’s 1911 best-selling novel about the attempt to harness the unpredictable Colorado River and reclaim the Imperial Valley, an irrigation project considered impossible. Sam Goldwyn rationalized the price he paid for the novel –  $125,000 – with the assumption that if a million copies of the book had been sold, he was buying an audience of 10 million people.
In 1976, I was at a Western Film Festival in Sun Valley, Idaho. Someone mentioned that among the guests – King Vidor, Tim McCoy – would be Henry King. Amazingly, I heard he had just flown in, piloting his own plane – at the age of 88. That was the sort of understated flamboyance that characterized the man. A former actor, Henry King had been directing since 1915, making his first big hit in 1919 with 23 and a Half Hours Leave, starring Richard Barthelmess. Among his other silent classics are Tol’able David (1921) and Stella Dallas (1925). I was anxious to talk to him about The Winning of Barbara Worth because we wanted to feature it in our Hollywood TV series. I had seen the film on l6mm and greatly admired it.
The documentary reconstruction is of such a high standard that it places the film on a level with the other great western epics, The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924). But whereas those films were set in the 19th century, this is an epic of 20th-century pioneering. How startling to see buckboards and prairie schooners sweeping through the desert, leaving in their wake an immobilized Model T Ford!
The film is frank about such modern miracles as the irrigation of the Imperial Valley; financiers were promised such a staggering return on their investment that gangsters were hired to keep the workforce under control. The picture climaxes with a catastrophe – when the Colorado River burst its banks, flooded the valley, and created the Salton Sea – which actually happened, in 1905. Ned Mann’s special effects are exceptional, and the sequence has a terrifying reality.
King and his location manager Ray Moore searched the deserts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico before they finally found what was needed – a  desert in precisely the condition of the Imperial Valley 20 years earlier, before the great work of reclamation had started – in northwest Nevada, the Black Rock Desert. That night King wired Goldwyn: “We found it. The one desert in all the world for The Winning of Barbara Worth.” A semi-arid landscape of lava beds and alkali flats, Black Rock – which in recent years has become the site of the annual counterculture “Burning Man” festival – was a natural stand-in for the Imperial Valley. On its surface there are no birds, bees, ants, or flies. No animals are found, as even the jack-rabbit requires water, and there is no water.
Neither Ronald Colman nor Vilma Banky were keen on the location. Colman had endured the Yuma desert for Beau Geste, and Vilma Banky had suffered through it with Valentino on The Son of the Sheik.
Art director Carl Oscar Borg drew up plans for the three towns that had to be built in the desert. The Western Pacific Railroad laid a spur line to the new city of Barbara Worth, Nevada (“Barba” in the film), based on El Centro, California. A vast tent city housed the extras, and a mess hall, bakery, and recreation center were constructed. Once the well had been drilled, hot water rose from 185 feet beneath the desert and fed the shower-bath system. King felt that the company underwent greater hardship than the people who had settled the Imperial Valley. The fierce temperature changes – from 120 degrees during the day to freezing at night – were accompanied by baby tornadoes. One of these destroyed much of the motion picture town of Kingston, doing $10,000 worth of damage.
A director in charge of a major film is the equivalent of a general. Moving day at “Barbara Worth” was one of many; Henry King moved the entire city of 2,000 inhabitants over a distance of 70 miles in less than 24 hours, through a territory without roads, inhabitants, wells, or power connections. For the last stage a road several miles long was constructed over shifting sand dunes, a road capable of supporting the weight of ten-ton trucks carrying heavy water tanks.
Actors in films like this didn’t have to act; projecting their own personality was enough. King wanted the film to be absolutely authentic, and used as many local people as he could, preferring “to have one line of nature on a man’s face to two drawn by grease paint.”
The salaries Goldwyn was willing to pay ranged from Ronald Colman’s $1750 a week through Banky’s $1,000, to Gary Cooper – yet to become a star – at $50 a week. The audience response to Gary Cooper was immediate. Goldwyn offered him a contract starting at $60 a week, but at the end of seven years Cooper wanted $1,000 a week, not the $750 Goldwyn was willing to pay. “I don’t think any kid is worth a thousand a week,” said Goldwyn. Cooper finished the film without a contract. A Paramount agent was at the premiere, and by 10 o’clock the next morning Cooper had signed with them.
The film was shot entirely on the new panchromatic stock by George Barnes and his assistant, Gregg Toland. Fifteen years later Toland would photograph Citizen Kane.

Kevin Brownlow