The Great Train Robbery
The Great Train Robbery
The Great Train Robbery (1903) is one of the most popular and important early silent films. It was directed by Edwin S. Porter (1869–1941) for the Edison Company and was enjoyed by audiences for several years after its initial release. What makes this film outstanding is its ambitious length and style of storytelling. Most films of the period lasted only two or three minutes and contained less than a handful of shots. The Great Train Robbery told its story in about twelve minutes, linking fourteen individual shots together to complete a cohesive plot-line. It is also often called the first recognizably modern Western (see entry under 1930s—Film and Theater in volume 2)
The original publicity for this audience pleaser stated that it was meant to present "a faithful duplication of the genuine 'Hold Ups' made famous by various outlaw bands in the far West." The plot is action packed. Bandits enter a telegraph office and tie up the telegraph operator. Then they stop a train and rob the express car and its passengers before escaping on horseback. Next, the telegraph operator's daughter finds her father and unties him. He alerts the people of the town, and they form a posse (PAH-see; a group of people who search for someone) to capture the bandits. The posse chases the bandits and succeeds in killing them.
The film made use of interesting special effects to highlight parts of the story. Two new techniques were especially thrilling to the audience. First, Porter created a sense of realism by stopping the action to insert a dummy for a real-life actor and restarting the camera as the dummy was tossed from a moving train. To tell the story, Porter filmed all the action from a distance, in a series of long shots. Then, after the completion of the story, he zoomed in for a close-up. In a close-up, the camera is placed so close to the subject that the viewer sees him or her only from the chest up; in the movie theater, Porter's closeup shot showed a bandit firing a gun at the camera—and simultaneously at the audience! Early movie audiences had not experienced seeing close-ups and were quite entertained by this powerful final shot.
Compared to today's films, The Great Train Robbery is not really an example of clever editing or technological innovation, but it is an illustration of a highly entertaining, longer narrative film that offered early cinema audiences a more detailed story-telling format.
—Audrey Kupferberg
For More Information
Fenin, George N., and William K. Everson. The Western. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973.
Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.