Review of The Great Train Robbery

This 15-minute film is obviously a pioneer of a medium new to the turn-of-the-century world and I was impressed with the innovation of shot-framing for the time period. The shot set-ups for many scenes helped to make the picture more exciting considering that the camera would not be moved during shooting. For instance there are scenes filmed from on top a moving train and from a forest road where bandits and their pursuers gallop toward the camera's positions while firing at each other. Early movies before this were not nearly as innovative in setting up shots, even as basic as they seem to us now almost a century later.

I commend this movie also in attempting stunts and fight scenes. I had to laugh though when a bandit is fighting a engineer on top of the locomotive car roof and once he beats him unconscious the live victim is replaced with a stuffed man-sized dummy and thrown overboard with a casual fling by his abuser. Also, the bandits make what I thought to be a very clean getaway far ahead of any possible pursuer (commandeer a locomotive engine to the mountains, flee on foot into the mountain woodlands, meet up with their waiting horses) but somehow the posse heroes catch up with them the very next scene from belatedly finding out about the train robbery the bandits pulled off.

Anyway, it was an interesting and unintentionally amusing film. Far more exciting than all the other turn-of-the-century films I've seen on the Library of Congress website (loc.gov).