How “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) Revolutionised Cinema
From narrative storytelling to filming on location and creating a buzz — “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) might be one of the most significant movies ever made.
Have you ever watched a movie and noticed a shot that seems out of place? Something that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the movie but sticks with you long after the credits roll? That’s how I feel about a particular shot from the movie “Goodfellas”.
The scene is in the very end of the movie, where Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) breaks the fourth wall and says, “I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” But what I find most interesting in it, is the seemingly random shot inserted in between , where Joe Pesci’s character breaks the fourth wall and shoots directly at the camera.
At this point in the movie however, Joe Pesci’s character has already been dead for a while, so why even include it and then move on with the scene like nothing has happened?
After doing a bit of research, I found and interview with Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese, the director of “Goodfellas”, in which he says that the shot was a direct reference of a silent film from 1903 called “The Great Train Robbery” and he wanted to pay homage to it.
The curiosity got the better of me and considering how much I love “Goodfellas” I was excited to see what the reference is about. So I did, and it turns out — we owe a lot to this old 12 minute silent film. To understand why, we need to take a quick history lesson.
In the early 1900s, cinema was a brand new art form. A movie was just a single shot of something mundane happening, like a train arriving at a station or workers going home from a factory. They were basically mini-documentaries of everyday life, no longer than a minute each. To make up for how short they were, theaters would project a bunch of them in a row, but without any real connection between them. People loved them for their novelty, but nobody thought of them as much more than what they were — a moving picture, or movies.
As the years went by, however, filmmakers began experimenting with different visual effects and tricks and slowly but surely trying to tell more intricate stories. And that’s when in 1903, Edwin Porter released “The Great Train Robbery”, which would mark the beginning of a new chapter in cinema history.
To start off, “The Great Train Robbery” is one of the earliest examples of narrative storytelling, or, in other words, it had an actual plot. The movie takes place in the Wild West and tells the story of two bandits who break into a telegraph office and force the operator to stop the train. They then knock him out, tie him up, and board a train together with the rest of their bandit friends.
We then see some fights, they steal a bunch of stuff, manage to take control of the train, rob the passengers, and then run away with all the stolen stuff. Meanwhile, and this is very important, we see a shot of the operator regaining his consciousness and going to the local dance hall to tell everyone about the robbery. The two storylines then connect when we see the locals chasing the bandits and after a big shootout, they win and get all the stolen stuff back.
But that’s not everything. Back when it was released, the Wild West wasn’t just a time period in history, it was very much current times. People were reading daily in the newspapers about all the crazy things that were happening over there and “The Great Train Robbery” managed to capitalize on that with a big marketing campaign. It was advertised as a “headliner”, “the most realistic depiction of the famous outlaws in the West”, and “the most spectacular film ever made”. Essentially, much like modern movies, it created a lot of buzz and attention around it. It got people excited, it made them want to see it, and when they actually did, it over-delivered.
And the reason is that back then, most movies were filmed much like a theater play, on a set with the actors and props behaving much like they would on a stage. But most of “The Great Train Robbery” was filmed on a location. The camera was outside, on the top of a moving train, in the forest. It was packed with action, with violence, with stunts. It even had a brief comic relief scene in between all the action, something that movies are still doing to this day.
Which leads us back to the iconic shot of the outlaw shooting directly at the camera. This genuinely caught people off guard and scared some of them. It had nothing to do with the movie and Edwin Porter could have easily not included it, but to me, adding this one extra little thing on top of everything else elevated this movie to more than just a story. It was an experience.
And that’s what makes “The Great Train Robbery” so special. It managed to combine all of those things and do them really, really well. It got people excited to see a movie for the story and it showed them the huge potential this art form has. The success of it was enough to prove that there was enough demand to start building theaters for the specific purpose of watching movies — the nickelodeons, and the rest as they say, is history.
Psst. If you enjoyed this and also like visuals — I publish video essays about film history and the movie industry on my YouTube channel - Toni’s Film Club.
