Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Nonureva Really Surprised!

classicsoncall Despite it's humble and simple origins, this eleven minute silent film is wonderful for it's attempt at telling a story using the Western genre as it's format. The version I saw on Turner Classics contained a number of surprising elements that I wasn't expecting from a picture made in 1903. The first of these was the complete silence of the picture, no musical accompaniment of any kind, making this an unusual, one of a kind experience. Then, when the outlaws in the story blew up the strongbox in the train's mail car, a bright flash of orange and yellow lit up the screen making me wonder how the effect was achieved. Other viewers here comment on the process so I'll defer to those who know better.The use of color is done sparingly but to wonderful effect, and when I first saw the young girl in red attempting to wake up the injured mail clerk, the first thing I thought of was Little Red Riding Hood. The process is used again on the dresses of the dancing women and during the posse chase when gunshots are highlighted in a colorful powder flash similar to the earlier strongbox explosion. The very last frames of the cowboy shooting directly at the viewer was done in color as well, a neat touch to bring the brief story to a conclusion.The story itself was a forerunner to all those thousands of B Westerns that were soon to follow in the Thirties and Forties with endless horse chases and gunfights to excite movie goers of all ages. As expected, the bandits get their due in the film as they are all done in by the dance hall posse that quickly assembled to chase down the bad guys. The other main highlight of the picture had to be the crowd of train passengers who were forced off the train at gunpoint during the robbery.Oh, I shouldn't forget this item of note, it was kind of interesting. When the robbers made their way on the train, one of the engine crew came out to fight off an outlaw, and in the tussle that followed, he was beaten up by the bad guy. The transition that then occurred was kind of neat, because you couldn't tell exactly when the live actor turned into the dummy that was thrown off the train!

des-47 Though by no means the first with a Western setting, this film was a breakthrough for the genre and, with a plot involving black-clad trigger happy bandits holding up a train then receiving rough justice at the hands of a posse following a horseback chase, helped established several elements of its iconography. Like so much else that was later to seem newly minted for the cinema, these images had precedents in other media, including popular fiction, graphic art and touring stage spectacles known as Wild West Shows which presented a romanticised, gun-totin' version of the American West in the late Victorian period. But location filming provided the opportunity to present these elements in a new setting of realistic visual grandeur and scale – even if, as here, New Jersey stood in for the West.Like various other longer narrative films in these early days, The Great Train Robbery tells its story largely by stringing together a succession of tableaux, with studio and location scenes staged alike in long shot. At around 12 minutes, with 14 shots, it builds in length, ambition and achievement on Edison director Edwin S Porter's Life of an American Fireman, released a few months earlier, though in some respects is less visually imaginative. A lengthy scene where the villains force passengers off the train and rob them shows the limitations of the technique: the shot is perfectly set up for the dramatic death of a would-be escapee who runs towards the camera before being killed, and later after the bandits depart and the crowd swarms round the corpse, but otherwise it's difficult to see what's going on.Elsewhere Porter makes good use of the opportunities for movement and energy. He shoots from the back of a moving locomotive across the top of the cab to the track ahead as the villains stalk towards the crew. And a contemporary director would likely choose a similar camera position for the shot where the mounted bandits are chased through the woods by the posse, exchanging gunfire as they go. Notably, there are two early examples of camera movement, put to very good use when the villains leave the hijacked loco. The camera pans and tilts with the characters, setting up the expectation that there's something of interest just off frame, which is then revealed as a group of waiting horses on which they make their final escape.But the film is best known for a shot completely tangential to the narrative, in which actor Justus D Barnes, as the leader of the gang, expressionlessly points his revolver at the camera and fires six shots at point blank range. The shot is usually placed at the end of the film, after the character has been killed on screen, but Porter suggested it could also be re-edited as the opening shot if distributors preferred. It's a striking image of violence directed at the audience, but there are now no reports of screaming and ducking as with the Lumières' train.Far from being 'realistic', the shot, and the film as a whole, exemplify the growing tendency of cinema to exploit the vicarious thrill of danger and violence in a contained, safe space. The image is cinema's second enduring icon after Méliès' moon, and has been much parodied and homaged, most notably in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, with Joe Pesci's psychotic gangster standing in for Barnes' outlaw. But in the later film it's actually the penultimate shot. It's followed by a view of the narrator, Ray Liotta's police informer, smiling smugly at the camera before retreating into the comfortable suburban home he occupies under his new identity, safe in the knowledge that the bad guys and their guns are now illusions, locked in their cel(l) of film.

SenjoorMutt 'The Great Train Robbery' considered to be the first western and action film as it was first film that laid out the recognizable genre form. Milestone film that used on-location shooting and frequent camera movements.Story is very simplistic, but it was the time when directors and writers seriously started to develop film as a story telling devise, rather than simply showing factory workers walking home. Despite it's simplistic story 'The Great Train Robbery' cemented the themes that became generally popular in western genre - outlaws, bandits, robberies and lawmen. And of course small comic relief in the dance hall where local men shooting at the feet of a dancing stranger.

ofpsmith This amazing picture is only 10 minutes long. So I could watch this while waiting to be taken to school, which I did once. But it's very innovative in that it tells a story to the audience. A group of bandits during the wild west period stick up a train and rob the passengers. Then they steal a train and run off. A posse of armed men pursues them and there is soon a big shootout in the woods somewhere. And that's really about it. But it's influential mainly because it's one of the first films ever to tell a story however brief it may be. It features a very famous shot at the end when one of the bandits looks straight at the camera then he fires at the camera. And then the film ends. Some versions I've found even have colored in aspects, like red smoke or something like that. There are a lot of versions on you tube to watch it so by all means please do so.