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The Great Train Robbery (1903) Background
The material for Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery came from two sources: playwright Scott Marble’s successful 1896 stage melodrama of the same name, and an actual hold-up staged by George Leroy Parker’s (Butch Cassidy’s) Hole-in-the-Wall gang on the No 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks heading into Table Rock, Wyoming on 29th August 1900 during which the gang forced the conductor to unhitch the passenger cars from the rest of the train before blowing up the safe in the mail car and making off with around $5,000 in cash. The film was advertised as ‘a faithful duplication of the genuine 'Hold Ups' made famous by various outlaw bands in the far West.’
The film is often referred to as the first story film, the first western and the film with the first close-up, all of which are untrue. A number of films released before The Great Train Robbery had contained a simple story of sorts, although none were as lengthy or intricate as Porter’s film; close-ups had been used as early as 1896, when Edison filmed May Irwin and John C. Rice’s The Kiss, and the first two western films, Kit Carson and The Pioneers had been filmed two months earlier – although they were not widely distributed until 1904 when The Great Train Robbery had become a hit. Edison had also touched upon the genre in the short 1898 vignette Cripple Creek Barroom. The film was, however, the first dramatically creative film to make use of a pattern – that of crime, pursuit and retribution – that would prove to be a staple of the Western genre.
Gilbert Maxwell Anderson (formerly Max Aronson), who was employed by the Edison studios in October 1903 to appear in their films and to dream up gags, was cast in the film when he lied about being able to ride a horse, a fact which is evident in the slow and awkward final chase. Anderson would go on to greater fame and fortune as a partner in the Essanay film company and as early serial film hero ‘Bronco Billy.’
Filming took place largely on a track of the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad near Dover, New Jersey.
The film premiered at Huber’s Museum, a second-rate vaudeville theatre on New York City’s 14th Street in mid-December, in the same week that the Wright Brothers flew for the first time at Kitty Hawk. According to Anderson the crowd was indifferent when the film was announced, but was soon roused as it scenes began to unfold. ‘They got up and shouted and yelled, and then when it was all over they yelled, 'Run it again! Run it again!', until [the management] finally put on the lights to chase them out,’ he reported. Audiences had seen nothing like it on the screen before. The film ran for over 11 minutes, far longer than anything they had previously seen. Within a week, the film was booked into 11 theatres in and around New York, including the upmarket Hammerstein’s Theatre on 42nd and Broadway where it received a ‘rousing, rousing reception.’ Soon, exhibitors around the country obtained the film. Audiences were reported to duck for cover when Justus D. Barnes pointed his gun at the screen and fired at them, believing they were about to be shot
It was the most popular and commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era, the country’s first blockbuster and box-office hit, and it helped establish the belief that, despite the increased costs involved with this type of product, film could be both a creative and commercially feasible medium. [ADD]
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