The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Again, no quote, for reasons which should be obvious.

I'll confess I'm not feeling too well disposed towards Thomas Edison after reading about what he did to poor old Georges Méliès, but in the context of the other early silents I've recently seen this is extraordinary. Extraordinary enough, in fact, to make up for my dismay at the fact that there aren't quite as many very early short silents worth reviewing as I'd assumed. There may be fewer reviews tonight than expected.

The plot is quite straightforward and dramatic, depicting a train robbery, getaway, and the eventual deaths of the robberies in a shootout. It seems to take place in the present day, which in 1903 was a perfectly sensible thing to do. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are both, after all, alive and well. The many deaths by shooting seem all the more horrifying through being shown in silence; the film doesn't flinch from realistic violence. Crime doesn't pay, we're told in no uncertain terms. The robbers aren't very sympathetic (they murder a lot of people) but it's a bit worrying to note that no one thinks to arrest them or get them to surrender- they're just shot.

This is so, so different from the other silents I've seen. It isn't a stage with a camera pointed at it, in spite of the static cameras; it takes place mostly on location, with a real sense of physical space. There's an extraordinary scene shot from a camera mounted on the tender of a moving train. And we finish on a close-up in which a man shoots at the camera. This made me jump, now in 2012; I'm sure that it was all the more effective in a time when the camera was not expected to do such things.

It's interesting that the gunsmoke should be coloured orange, although I was rather puzzled by the apparently random use of colour during the brief dancing scene. Perhaps they just did it because they could.