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Author
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Topic: “The Great Train Robbery” (1903)
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted March 21, 2007 04:40 PM
When you see “The Great Train Robbery” (1903), you are looking at the infancy of the motion pictures as a medium to tell stories. In the years following the first successful films, it didn’t seem obvious how this new technology should be used. The earliest commercial films were very commonly things like people riding bicycles or lifting weights or little snips of boxing matches. Silent Movie story telling involved a whole set of conventions which are familiar today, but didn’t exist at all back then. “The Great Train Robbery” is where they started to develop.
The entire story basically comes down to seven sentences: (Sorry if I give it away!)
1) Some bad guys hold up the railroad depot, knock out and tie up the station agent.
2) They sneak onto the next train that stops, shoot the baggage master, and steal the strong box.
3) They stop the train and rob the passengers, shooting one in the process.
4) They escape on the stolen locomotive and then on horseback.
5) The station agent is revived and untied by a little girl and he alerts the good guys.
6) The good guys find the bad guys counting their ill gotten gain and shoot them.
7) The End (no, wait…that’s not a sentence!)
This is bare-bones story telling. Since they hadn’t come up with the idea of letting the characters “speak” through titles yet, there is no “dialog” (come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing an actor even speaking on camera!). None of the characters have names either. There is none of the more modern concern with motivation (Did the bad guys grow up in un-nurturing homes? Were they unemployed and desperate to support families? Were they just a bunch of greedy thugs who simply needed to be shot?) For reasons not apparent, and likely never even considered, It just happens, and we’re there to see it.
Acting? Well, for one thing, this may be the debut of the classic “Silent Movie Death”. When people get shot in this film, immediately they stand bolt upright, point both hands and their face up at the sky and stagger around about five steps before falling down flat on their backs, sometimes twitching if there is a loud noise on set. At one point, a gunman crouches down and supports himself by shoving the barrel of his six-gun into the floor and leaning on the grip. (For crying out loud, use your holster!)
Here we see the dawn of Special Effects too. Here is colorization many decades before it became both common and controversial. Prints of this film were often hand-painted so that at odd moments there are bursts of color. These are usually seen on costumes and sometimes in clouds of smoke from gunshots. A hundred years ago it must have been stunning. Audiences had different sensibilities in those days. Legend has it that the scene of one of the bad guys “shooting” into the audience at the end actually scared people! If they had seen “Jaws”, these people probably wouldn’t have returned to the beach until the fifties!
There is a fistfight out on the deck of the engine’s tender, and after the bad guy knocks the fireman out, there is a jerky cut, the fireman is replaced by a dummy and “he” is tossed off the moving train. (…much like the scene in “The Music Box” where the piano drags “Ollie” down the stairs!)
This first movie story also happens to be the first Western. It was filmed out on the great, wild frontiers of New Jersey! Back in the days when Edison was “Movies”, New Jersey was “Hollywood”!
Suffice it to say: this is not one of those movies that will leave you pondering the deeper meaning of it all for days afterward. It is what it is! Its greatness is that the decades of motion pictures that followed largely grew from this one root. It established an editorial style of moving the story through a sequence of scenes which is still in place today.
It is also one of those movies that’s absolutely better from a mechanical projector on a large screen, since these are simply its natural element. Watching it presented digitally would be like eating a fancy meal off a paper plate!
“The Great Train Robbery” is very commonly available as a 200 Foot Blackhawk print. There is often one on E-bay, sometimes two. Because of the colorization, it is available in Super-8 both in a color version (Blackhawk catalog number prefix “865”) and black and white version (prefix “860”). Corresponding R8 prefixes should be “820” and “810”, respectively. I have the color version. The heads and tails, including the introduction and the usual Blackhawk titles, are on B&W stock and then the movie itself is color with two ponderous splices (guaranteed to clean your gate, if not pop the lens right out on the table!) holding it all together. The colorized effect is a touch on the weird side, and unfortunately the color stock is prone to red fading, which is made all the more obvious when the machine climbs over that first splice. I watched a print on B&W stock in nice condition recently, and actually liked it better.
Blackhawk had a great sense of history and it comes through in the way this print is presented. There is a nice prologue explaining the significance of the film, and also an explanation of Blackhawk’s own efforts to get it up on the screen all those decades later.
There is something magical about seeing motion pictures made this long ago in any case. My grandfather was born in 1903. The Wright Brothers first flew that year. Teddy Roosevelt was President. Queen Victoria reigned until the year before last. If you had mentioned “The World War”, people probably would have thought you meant the War of 1812, since that’s basically all that expression could have meant to them. There was still a Czar, and still a Kaiser. Yet here we are more than a century down the road looking into their world as if through a window. Because of the technological leap forward that generation made, ours is the first to be able to do that...Kind of amazing!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Osi Osgood
Film God
Posts: 10204
From: Mountian Home, ID.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted March 22, 2007 10:13 AM
Doug, it's amazing that this indivisual would only focus on the dummy!
I am so entranced by this film, (and I have the "colourized" standard 8mm Blackhawk film version as well, slight fading to pink), as it's wonderful to really visit a time that I could never visit.
It's amazing to me. The old west was still pretty much alive and well, though beginning to wane, and while this is "Hollywood" (before Hollywood) the costuming is much closer to the way the average cowboy dressed. This was before the singing cowboy and stuff of that nature, and so it's wonderful to see a more authentic western, dummy aside.
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"All these moments will be lost in time, just like ... tears, in the rain. "
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Osi Osgood
Film God
Posts: 10204
From: Mountian Home, ID.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted March 22, 2007 04:34 PM
It's so cool that this series of posts has an amazing effect on the forum members.
Your right Steve about the print quality. The print I have is a rather early print by Blackhawk, and the image is rather striking. I have seen some prints on video and other sources, (TV programs, for instance), and Blackhawk also did thier own restoration on this print, (the earlier versions of this, I believe, had a title card on thier own restoration of the print. I'll see if my copy has that), getting rid of surface scratches and such.
I have heard those rumors about this not being the original release of this film. There were two versions of this, in 1902 and 1903, but they were filmed with the same cast. Also of note is that one of the hero's/villians (?) was played by William S. Hart, who would go onto making the best of the silent SERIOUS features, the best being "Hell's Hinges" which is very adult, and while most film Cowboys looked like they belonged in a beauty salon instead of on the open range, W.S. Hart had a slim flinty eyed realism, not only in appearance but also in the films themselves.
A great review, as well as a wonderful super 8 release. I have it on the same reel as one of the first animated movies, "Gertie the Dinosaur" by Windsor Mc Cay.
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"All these moments will be lost in time, just like ... tears, in the rain. "
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