Guns: The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Posted on August 13, 2011
Filed Under films, silent films

The most famous shot in the most famous of all pre-nickelodeon films is literally a gunshot—or rather, several gunshots. It’s the moment at the end of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) when Justus Barnes, playing one of the train robbers, empties his pistol directly at the camera. (11:25 in the above.) It’s a medium close-up made with the camera right in front of the player. Edison’s sales circular suggested that the exhibitor could place the shot at either the beginning of the film or at the end. Placing it at the beginning made more sense, given that the audience sees the bandits shot down by a pursuing posse in the film’s climactic gunfight, but most exhibitors placed it at the end, because it made for a sensational close.

The Great Train Robbery is a perfect one-reeler and the first great Western. Its 13 scenes tell a compact, exciting, violent story in which four men rob a train and are tracked down by a posse that guns down the whole gang. Porter incorporates numerous technical innovations into the film—cross-cutting, double exposure, hand-tinting etc.—and while none of them were unique to him, never had they been combined in so startling and effective a manner. That said, nothing in the film was (or is) as talked-about as the outlaw’s spectacular fusillade at the camera. Here was an effect the legitimate stage could never equal. Audiences viscerally understood that hardly anyone had ever seen a gun fired from that perspective and lived to talk about it.

The Internet Movie Firearms Database says that Barnes is firing a Colt Model 1878 double-action revolver—note that he does not pause to cock the weapon between shots. The piece may be a purpose-built prop, but I think it’s more likely a working firearm loaded with just enough powder to produce a satisfying burst of smoke with each shot. Working or not, the appearance of a real weapon added verisimilitude to the action and was another distinction from stage productions, which often relied on small prop handguns resembling starter’s pistols.

The Great Train Robbery was no period piece—in fact, for its original audience it had a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. The film’s scenario is said to have been inspired by a Wyoming train robbery carried out by George Parker (better known as “Butch Cassidy”) and his Wild Bunch just three years earlier. At the time of the film’s release, Parker and his partner, Harry Longabaugh (“the Sundance Kid”) were still at large. One month before The Great Train Robbery was released authorities in Wyoming hanged Tom Horn, the enigmatic cowboy/contract killer who as a youth helped track down Geronimo. Six months after the film’s release Harvey Logan (“Kid Curry”), the most violent of the outlaws in the Wild Bunch, shot himself to death in Colorado after being wounded in a gunfight with a posse not much different from the final gunfight in Porter’s remarkable film. The Wild West was still plenty wild in 1903.

Of course there’s plenty of hokum in The Great Train Robbery, such as the scene in which the telegrapher’s daughter appeals to Heaven while reviving her injured father, or when partying cowboys fire their pistols at the feet of a foppish Easterner to make him dance. And for all its shock value, Barnes’ gunfire at the camera is hokum, too. Notice the way he raises the revolver, lifting the barrel until for an instant it’s pointed at the ceiling before dropping it into firing position and unleashing his cannonade. That’s the way a stage actor handles a prop gun—and the way an eight-year-old boy throws down when he’s playing cowboys-and-Indians. The mix of realistic gun violence and stagy theatricality was the trademark of Westerns for decades.

The Great Train Robbery is a sort of signal flare, a peremptory announcement of what is to come: Movies were going to take over the world. It’s telling that the announcement ends in a blaze of gunfire. The movies that took over the world are about different things, they tell different stories in different ways, but all along and even now many of them—perhaps most of them—are about a man with a gun shooting someone.

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previous: I Love Lucy: the “Lost Pilot” (March 2, 1951)

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