The Great Train Robbery is one of the landmark films in the development of narrative cinema. It tells the story of a group of bandits who climb aboard a train and rob it; they make their escape and are then chased by law enforcers and end up in a shoot-out. Up until this film, cinema was mainly at best a means of depicting visual trickery. What this movie did that was revolutionary was to tell a relatively complex story involving a number of different locations. Of course, from a modern perspective it is as simple as can be, but in the early years of the medium it just wasn't immediately obvious how to use this new technology to tell a story. It took a while for early audiences to understand what techniques such as cross-cutting actually meant. This film was extremely important in putting together some of the early basic cinematic story-telling devices in a way audiences could comprehend. And not only that, it introduced, via its story of a group of bandits robbing a train, some of the key ingredients that would go on to form an indelible part of genre cinema. The film ends on a scene that was more in keeping with the more gimmicky films of the time, when we are confronted with an actor who fires his gun directly at the camera, or at the audience. I imagine this would've caused a bit of consternation among some of the earlier cinema-goers. Despite this being the most famous part of the film, it's only fair to say that The Great Train Robbery is much more significant as a key work in the development as cinema as a narrative medium. It's enormously important in the history of cinema.
Review of The Great Train Robbery
