The Great Train Robbery 1903

The story

Two masked men walk into a railway telegraph office and force the operator to stop the next train with a false order to take on water. They tie him up. At the water tank the gang, four in all, slips aboard.

Two break into the express car, shoot the messenger and blow open the strongbox with dynamite. The other two climb over the tender to the engine, where one beats the fireman senseless with a lump of coal and throws him off the moving train. The passengers are lined up beside the track and robbed; one who runs is shot down. The gang rides the uncoupled engine up the line, takes to the woods and reaches its horses.

Back at the office, the operator's small daughter cuts him free and revives him with a glass of water. He staggers into a dance hall, where the locals are making a tenderfoot dance by shooting at his feet. A chase on horseback, a shoot-out in the woods, and every bandit is dead.

Then a fourteenth shot, outside the story: an outlaw looks straight at you, raises his revolver and fires six times.

Who made it

Edwin S. Porter was 33 and ran the Edison Manufacturing Company's rooftop studio at 41 East 21st Street in New York. He directed and worked the camera, with J. Blair Smith as second cameraman.

It was shot in November 1903: the interiors in the studio, the woods in the South Mountain Reservation in Essex County, New Jersey, and the train on the Lackawanna railway. Nothing was filmed west of New Jersey.

Justus D. Barnes played the leader of the outlaws and Walter Cameron the sheriff. A young stage actor who had just changed his name from Max Aronson to G. M. Anderson took three parts: a robber, the passenger who is shot, and the tenderfoot. He later claimed a share of the direction, and the historian Charles Musser allows that he may have helped. Anderson went on to become "Broncho Billy", the screen's first cowboy hero.

Where it came from

The title and the idea came from the stage: Scott Marble's melodrama The Great Train Robbery opened in Chicago in 1896 and was revived in New York in 1902. The way of telling it came from Britain. In June 1903 Edison had copied and sold the Sheffield Photo Company's A Daring Daylight Burglary, a crime film with a chase, and Musser calls it "particularly influential" on Porter's.

The detail came from the newspapers. Musser reprints a report of September 1903 in which masked men hold up an express in Oregon, crawl over the tender to the engine and dynamite a car door. Edison's leaflet promised a "faithful duplication of the genuine 'Hold Ups' made famous by various outlaw bands in the far West". Butch Cassidy's Union Pacific raid of 1900 has also been suggested. That is a guess.

How it was made

Most of the film was shot out of doors, a long way from the painted stages of Méliès. Twice Porter brings the outdoors into the studio: a train pulls up outside the telegraph office window, and the landscape rushes past the open door of the express car. Both are matte shots, two exposures on one strip of film.

The camera moves, too. It rides on the train for the fight on the tender, and three times it swings to keep the action in view, once down and sideways together, shakily. For Musser, Porter filmed the robbery like a news event he could not control.

Reference books credit the film with cross-cutting, or parallel editing. Musser describes something looser. Twice the film steps back in time to show what was happening meanwhile: the fight on the tender during the robbery of the express car, and the operator's rescue during the getaway. It never cuts back and forth between two actions, and no titles explain. The timing, he writes, is "imprecise and open to interpretation".

Some prints were coloured by hand: in the Museum of Modern Art's copy, gunfire and dynamite flare orange and yellow, and the women at the dance wear bright dresses.

The man with the gun

The close-up of Barnes is the only one in the film. Edison's leaflet for exhibitors describes it:

A life size picture of Barnes, leader of the outlaw band, taking aim and firing point blank at each individual in the audience. (This effect is gained by foreshortening in making the picture.) The resulting excitement is great. This section of the scene can be used either to begin the subject or to end it, as the operator may choose.

Edison Manufacturing Company, leaflet no. 201, 1903

So the most famous ending in early cinema was also an optional beginning. The operator is the projectionist. The version that has come down to us puts the shot last.

Did audiences scream, duck or faint? It is the best-known story about the film, and the evidence is thin. Edison's "resulting excitement" is advertising. So is the catalogue for Siegmund Lubin's remake of 1904, which says that "women scream, and even though no sound is heard, they put their fingers in their ears to shut out the noise of the firing". None of the sources used for this note quotes anyone who saw a panic.

Why it matters

It was the hit that made story films pay. Musser calls its commercial success "unprecedented". By his account it opened at Huber's Museum in New York in December 1903 and was in eleven theatres around the city a week later. When nickelodeons spread from Pittsburgh in 1905, it was often the first film a new one showed.

It was not the first Western, and not the first story film. Films on Western subjects go back to the 1890s, and a one-minute British drama, Kidnapping by Indians, dates from 1899. Méliès' A Trip to the Moon and Porter's own Life of an American Fireman told stories first. In 1903 it was sold as a sensational crime picture. Historians disagree about what the Western owes it: Scott Simmon has argued that it led nowhere for the genre, which did not take off until about 1908. The safe claim is that it is one of the earliest Westerns, and that no film before it had been such a success.

The last shot is still being fired. In the closing moments of Goodfellas (1990), Joe Pesci shoots straight into the lens, and Martin Scorsese has called it a reference to Porter's film. The Library of Congress added The Great Train Robbery to the National Film Registry in 1990.