The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Released 7th December 1903
We can only imagine today the impact the famous shot of Justus D. Barnes glowering into the camera before firing his gun had on audiences back in 1903. By then, movies were ‘chasers’: a means of chasing stragglers from variety halls so that the next showing could begin. Yet here, seemingly from nowhere, came an extraordinary film of epic length (almost 12 minutes!) that featured a massive cast of around fifty. Such extravagance was unheard of – and the raw dynamism of its plot a revelation audiences wanted to watch over and over.
Before starting work on The Great Train Robbery, Edwin S. Porter filmed A Romance of the Rails,a thinly disguised promotional film financed by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. The DL&WR ran print ads featuring a young woman called Phoebe Snow, who wore a pristine white dress while riding aboard its railroad. DLW&R used anthracite coal to fuel its locomotives. Unlike other railroads’ fuels, it didn’t discharge cinders and soot, meaning her clothes were as spotless when she disembarked as when she climbed aboard. The ads extolled the fuel’s virtues with fancy prose: Says Phoebe Snow, about to go/Upon a trip to Buffalo:/”My gown stays white from morn till night/Upon the Road of Anthracite.”
For the film, Porter simply concocted a four-minute screen version of the print ad, engaging photographer’s model Marie Murray to play Phoebe. He filmed her climbing aboard a train wearing a pristine white dress, sitting in a carriage, and then disembarking. Her dress kept its immaculate condition throughout. The railroad company was pleased with the film and agreed to loan Porter a train for his next project. He planned on making a western, which the Edison company promised the public in early November 1903 would be a “highly sensationalized headliner.” The railroad also allowed him to film on tracks outside Paterson, New Jersey.
Porter conceived the film at the behest of Edison, who was concerned over the waning revenue from his studio’s output. The Great Train Robbery is sometimes erroneously hailed as the first narrative movie. It wasn’t the first. Among others, Georges Melies’ Trip to the Moon, and Porter’s own Jack and the Beanstalk and Life of an American Fireman preceded it. But it was the most influential early movie to tell a story and breathed new life into a burgeoning art form that was in danger of stagnating.
Porter wanted to tap into the public’s fascination with the daring robberies staged by outlaws like Butch Cassidy. He chose Scott Marble’s recently revived 1896 stage play The Great Train Robbery as the basis of his film. He also drew inspiration from innovative advances in film grammar made by the British ‘Brighton School’ of filmmakers.
Filming took place at several locations in November 1903. Porter shot interiors at the Edison studio in New York. He filmed the bandits crossing a stream at Thistle Mill Ford in the South Mountain Reservation at Essex County Park in New Jersey. Other scenes he filmed along the Lackawanna Railway line.
Its cast members included Marie Murray (DLW&R’s Phoebe Snow) as a dance hall girl and Max Aronson, a 23-year-old from Little Rock, Arkansas. Aronson won a part by falsely claiming he could ride a horse. When the time came to prove his ability, the horse promptly threw him off because he had tried mounting it from the wrong side. Fortunately for Aronson, Porter forgave him. He cast the young man in three parts: a robber, a fleeing passenger murdered by the outlaws, and a tenderfoot the robbers force to dance. It’s possible Porter also enlisted Aronson’s aid to devise and stage the film. Soon after filming The Great Train Robbery, Aronson changed his name to Gilbert M. Anderson. He became famous throughout the world as Broncho Billy, one of the screen’s first western heroes.
The film’s story is told in just fourteen scenes. It appears crude to modern audiences but was a revelation in the early 1900s. Audiences had grown bored with endless shots of processions and parades, distant shorelines viewed from slow-moving boats and studio-bound re-enactments of military encounters. If cinema was to survive, it needed a shot in the arm. The Great Train Robbery proved to be a breathlessly exciting antidote to all that dross.
The film opens with two masked gunmen forcing a telegraph operator to stop an approaching train, allowing them to board it at a water tank. They force their way into the express car, which holds the strongbox, and shoot dead the employee who threw the box key from the now-moving train. While the robbers blow the box open, their accomplices overpower the train’s engineer and fireman, bludgeoning the engineer to death and tossing him from the train. They stop the train and uncouple the locomotive. Then they force the passengers (played by Edison employees) out to relieve them of their valuables before escaping in the locomotive, which speeds them to their waiting horses.
Porter found several ways to inject excitement and realism into his picture. In the opening scene in the telegraph office, rear projection shows the train stopping outside. We see two passengers who appear to witness the men tying up the operator. Again, in the express car scenes, rear projection shows the countryside rolling by through the open door. The struggle between a bandit and the train’s engineer on top of a coal wagon is surprisingly brutal. After the bandit overpowers him, a dummy substitutes for the engineer in a near-seamless cut. The bandit then beats the engineer to death with a lump of coal before flinging his lifeless body from the moving train. Porter also twice uses a panning shot to follow the action, even tilting the camera to follow the robbers as they descend an embankment on horseback.
Edison advertised The Great Train Robbery as a re-enactment film “posed and acted in faithful duplication of the genuine ‘Hold-ups’ made famous by various outlaw bands in the Far West.” It received its debut at Huber’s Museum on 14th Street in New York. Huber’s was a low-class dime museum with a small theatre. Adjoining it was an arcade that featured sideshow attractions like the bearded lady and the tattooed man. According to poet Charles Hanson Towne, it also boasted ‘a diver who ate a banana under water in a soiled tank.’
Aronson claimed he had been present at the premiere. “I’ve seen some receptions to plays,” he said, “but I’ve never seen such a reception to a picture in my life. They got up and shouted and yelled, and then when it was all over, they yelled, ‘Run it again! Run it again!’ You couldn’t get them out. They sat there two or three times, and finally they put on the lights to chase them out.” As word circulated of this remarkable new ‘flicker’, more upmarket theatres played The Great Train Robbery. Again, Aronson attended the screening at possibly the most important New York theatre of the time: Hammerstein’s Theatre at 42nd and Broadway. He recalled that when the presenter announced the picture, “the people got up and started to walk to the exits. Then it started, and they looked back to see what was going on, and finally they stopped. And as it progressed, they started to come back to their seats and sit down. As the picture went on, you could hear a pin drop. Of course, they weren’t so demonstrative as down on 14th Street in the hobo district... They didn’t yell, but they were mystified at it, and after it was over they all, in one acclaim, gave it a rousing reception. And I said to myself: that’s it; it’s going to be the picture business for me.”
In June 1905, two brothers-in-law, Harry Davis and John Harris, installed 96 upholstered chairs in their new theatre at 433-435 Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh. They also added a piano to provide musical accompaniment and projected films onto a muslin sheet draped over a wall. They coined a name for their new venture that would spread across the country like wildfire. It was a combination of two words: nickel, which was the price of entry, and odeon, an ancient Greek word for an arena which held music shows and poetry competitions. Nickelodeon.
The film they chose to inaugurate their new business was by then the most successful film ever made: The Great Train Robbery. On their first day of business, they made $22.50; on the second, they cleared $76.00. Within weeks, they were opening at 8am every day and showing films continuously until midnight. They were raking in almost $1,000 each week by then.
The Great Train Robbery didn’t bring about an immediate change in the way films were made. But it marked a new dawn for cinema, and a new direction for Porter. This development didn’t exactly please the director who brought the movies back to life: he was always happier tinkering with cameras than operating them.