Film Analysis: The Great Train

One of the biggest milestones reached in the film industry was the narrative, movies that actually told a story. The first narrative movie was The Great Train Robbery, created in 1903 by Edwin S. Porter. The silent film is only about 10 minutes long, but was the precursor to the action and western genres. The popularity of the movie proved that motion pictures could be commercially successful. The plot of The Great Train Robbery was actually inspired from a real event. On August 29, 1900, four members from the famous outlaw George Leroy “Butch Cassidy” Parker’s “Hole in the Wall” gang stopped a train in Table Rock, Wyoming and stole $5,000. This movie was ripped from the headlines and captured the public’s imagination. The film opens with an operator working in a railroad telegraph office being held at gunpoint by bandits. He is ordered to transmit a message to the conductor to stop the train at the station’s water tank. He is then knocked unconscious and tied up. Next, the bandits board the train and force all the passengers off while taking their possessions. One passenger tried to get away, but was instantly shot in the back. While the robbers are escaping with all of their loot, the operator is
rescued by his daughter. He then rushes to a near by dance hall where people are forcing a man to dance by shooting at his feet. The operator tells them that there had been a robbery. The men quickly band together and overtake the bandits, killing them all. The final scene is a close up of one of the bandits pointing a gun directly into the camera and firing. This effect startled the audience for a split second as if they were actually about to be shot. The movie going public had never seen anything like it before. The gun-pointing scene became famous and many popular movies that we know today pay homage to it, like the iconic gun barrel opening sequence in the James Bond movies and the final scene in Goodfellas. The Great Train Robbery was revolutionary because new camera and editing techniques were used for the first time, including on-location shooting, frequent camera moving, and composite editing.
For example, the film used jump-cuts, also known as cross cutting, a complex editing technique used to show two different events happening simultaneously, but in different places. Furthermore, the movie showed people forced to dance by cowboys shooting at their feet, a scene that later became a quintessential part of any western film. Other elements from this movie that became a standard in future westerns include train hold ups, a suspenseful robbery involving violence and death, and an ultimate showdown between the good guys and the bad guys where the good guys always
win. The film is kind of silly and the acting is not the greatest, but you need to transport yourself back to that time period and watch it through the eyes of someone who has never seen a movie to really appreciate the groundbreaking techniques that came from this motion picture.