page_title: The Great Train Robbery (1903 film)
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: The Great Train Robbery (1903 film) / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot from The Great Train Robbery (1903)
context_page_description: The Great Train Robbery is a 1903 American silent short Western film made by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. It follows a gang of outlaws who hold up and rob a steam locomotive at a station in the American West, flee across mountainous terrain, and are finally defeated by a posse of locals. The short film draws on many sources, including a robust existing tradition of Western films, recent European innovations in film technique, the play of the same name by Scott Marble, the popularity of train-themed films, and possibly real-life incidents involving outlaws such as Butch Cassidy.
  Porter produced and photographed the film in New York and New Jersey in November 1903; the Edison studio began selling it to vaudeville houses and other venues in the following month. The cast included Justus D. Barnes and G. M. Anderson, who may have also helped with planning and staging. Porter's storytelling approach, though not particularly innovative or unusual for 1903, allowed him to include many popular techniques of the time, including scenes staged in wide shots, a matte effect, and an attempt to indicate simultaneous action across multiple scenes.
context_section_description: In the decades after The Great Train Robbery, various inaccurate legends developed, exaggerating its historical significance. By mid-century, mistaken claims that it was the "first Western" or even the "first story film" were common. Critiquing these inaccurate legends and citing the film's actual lack of impact on the Western genre, historian Scott Simmon comments that in fact the film's "main surprise in retrospect is how it led nowhere, either for its creator or the genre, beyond serving loosely as a narrative model for gun-wielding crime and horse-chase retribution." Claims about historical priority continued to be repeated by general-audience writers into the early twenty-first century.
  Later film critics, abandoning the exaggerated claims, have tended to explain the film's significance mostly in terms of its wide popularity and Porter's influential action-driven storytelling. William Everson and George Fenin dubbed it "the first dramatically creative American film", while Robert Sklar praised the film's capacity "to unite motion picture spectacle with myth and stories about America that were shared by people throughout the world." Historians have cited The Great Train Robbery as Porter's most important film, and noted it as a popular early film that collects numerous important Western tropes, such as "elements of fisticuffs, horseback pursuit and gunplay". Film historian Pamela Hutchinson highlights especially the iconic close-up scene, "a jolt of terror as disconcerting as a hand bursting from a grave":
  It's an especially violent act, both in real terms, and cinematic ones. The narrative momentum of the film is cast aside, then the fourth wall of the screen is broken by his gaze, only to be further ruptured by his bullets. Placed at the opening of the film, it might act as a trailer for the shoot-'em-up action to come. As a coda, it’s a warning to the audience that it's a wild world out there, and the violence continues even after the train robber case has been closed.
  The Great Train Robbery was added to the United States National Film Registry in 1990. In popular culture, numerous films and television shows have referenced the film and the iconic Barnes close-up:
  Historian James Chapman compares the James Bond gun barrel sequences, conceived by Maurice Binder, to the close-up.
  The Batman episode "The Riddler's False Notion" (1966) guest-stars silent film icon Francis X. Bushman as a film collector who owns a print of The Great Train Robbery.
  The German ZDF series Western von gestern (1978–1986) uses the Barnes close-up for its opening and closing sequences.
  The final scene of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), in which a character shoots at the camera, recreates the close-up as a homage. Scorsese has commented that the shot is "…a reference to the end of The Great Train Robbery… And the plot of this picture is very similar to The Great Train Robbery."
  The Arthur episode "Francine Frensky, Superstar" (1996) involves a school play featuring a loose reenactment of the film.
  The Breaking Bad episode "Dead Freight" (2012) pays homage to The Great Train Robbery, with a matching final shot.
  The BoJack Horseman episode "Say Anything" (2014) has show-business old-timer Lenny Turteltaub confusing The Great Train Robbery with the famous Lumiere film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, reminiscing: "As I said to Ed Porter at the premiere of The Great Train Robbery, 'Aggh! The train's coming right at me!'"
caption: The film's iconic image of Justus D. Barnes firing at the camera, in a sepia-toned print still
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