The Great Train Robbery (1903)
(On Cable TV, November 2021) There’s not much to say about The Great Train Robbery that hasn’t been said by everyone else in the past 110 years or so — it’s one of the earliest narrative American films, even if Wikipedia reports that its influence over Hollywood and the Western was relatively negligible. Technically, writer-director Edwin S. Porter’s film is rough beyond belief — although special effects are used in surprising ways more akin to their modern use as moviemaking shortcuts (that is — replacing a window frame with pre-shot content, simplifying the shot) than spectacles by themselves. And still, much of the narrative film (which ends very abruptly) is made forgettable by its last final shot, of a criminal pointing a gun at the viewer and shooting. At twelve minutes and such a low video quality that it doesn’t matter in which resolution it’s seen, The Great Train Robbery is short and available widely enough to be a painless essential viewing for anyone even remotely interested in cinema history.