The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery (1903) is Edwin S. Porter's silent Western, and you can watch online on iFILM. In eleven minutes it more or less invented the idea that a movie could tell a real story.

Four masked bandits knock out a telegraph operator, storm the mail car, blow the safe and seize the locomotive. They line the passengers up beside the train, strip them of money and valuables, then uncouple the engine and flee while a posse forms behind them. By modern standards the plot is bare bones. In 1903 it was a jolt: shot on location, cut between parallel actions, full of gunfire that audiences had never seen move like this.

Porter's short laid down techniques the medium still leans on, and it gave cinema one of its first legendary images, Justus D. Barnes firing his revolver straight into the camera. Theaters ran that shot at either the start or the end of the reel, and people flinched every time. If you want to know where the Western and the grammar of screen action began, it begins here. Stream The Great Train Robbery (1903) online on iFILM.