Oversight Marathon Film 1: The Great Train Robbery (1903)


A wise man once said that too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing.  Maybe the wise man didn’t say that.  I’m not wise enough to know that for sure.  Someone said something like that at some point.

The reason I am using that saying (which I might have made up) is because I saw The Great Train Robbery.  The Great Train Robbery is a twelve minute film about a train robbery.  Some bandits rob a train and there are some killings.  It’s twelve minutes long, so there isn’t much more than that happening on screen.

The reason I chose to watch The Great Train Robbery is because it was one of the most influential early films.  Being made in 1903, very early in the history of motion pictures, it is no wonder there is influence coming from it.  Most notably, there is a short scene at the end of The Great Train Robbery where a bandit points a gun directly at the camera and fires.  If that sounds familiar, the same sort of thing happened at the end of Goodfellas.

I enjoyed the eleven minutes I spent watching The Great Train Robbery.  It isn’t a great film by any means.  It is a great study in the history of film.  There were some new styles of editing used, which led to my favourite moment of the movie, when a bandit threw a dummy off of the train.  The clear difference between the dummy and the person that the dummy was supposed to be made me chuckle a little bit.  That might seem cruel because of the lack of resources in making movies in 1903, but I couldn’t help it.  There is also some primitive camera movements that would have been amazing at the time but seem flawed when you watch it now.

All the flaws aside, The Great Train Robbery was still quite an entertaining twelve minutes.  A robbery, some gunplay, a chase...what more could you ask of a movie?  If you ever get your hands on a copy of this and you have twelve minutes to spare, The Great Train Robbery is well worth a watch.  It’s a keystone in what films have become and it isn’t as boring as half of what is release in modern cinema.

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