Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Kirpianuscus ...at each new view. because it is more modern than you imagine. and new details are sources of seduction. a story almost perfect. because it has the gioft to present the basic traits of an ideal western, you feel the action and the only close up is legendary. short, a masterpiece.

des-47 Though by no means the first with a Western setting, this film was a breakthrough for the genre and, with a plot involving black-clad trigger happy bandits holding up a train then receiving rough justice at the hands of a posse following a horseback chase, helped established several elements of its iconography. Like so much else that was later to seem newly minted for the cinema, these images had precedents in other media, including popular fiction, graphic art and touring stage spectacles known as Wild West Shows which presented a romanticised, gun-totin' version of the American West in the late Victorian period. But location filming provided the opportunity to present these elements in a new setting of realistic visual grandeur and scale – even if, as here, New Jersey stood in for the West.Like various other longer narrative films in these early days, The Great Train Robbery tells its story largely by stringing together a succession of tableaux, with studio and location scenes staged alike in long shot. At around 12 minutes, with 14 shots, it builds in length, ambition and achievement on Edison director Edwin S Porter's Life of an American Fireman, released a few months earlier, though in some respects is less visually imaginative. A lengthy scene where the villains force passengers off the train and rob them shows the limitations of the technique: the shot is perfectly set up for the dramatic death of a would-be escapee who runs towards the camera before being killed, and later after the bandits depart and the crowd swarms round the corpse, but otherwise it's difficult to see what's going on.Elsewhere Porter makes good use of the opportunities for movement and energy. He shoots from the back of a moving locomotive across the top of the cab to the track ahead as the villains stalk towards the crew. And a contemporary director would likely choose a similar camera position for the shot where the mounted bandits are chased through the woods by the posse, exchanging gunfire as they go. Notably, there are two early examples of camera movement, put to very good use when the villains leave the hijacked loco. The camera pans and tilts with the characters, setting up the expectation that there's something of interest just off frame, which is then revealed as a group of waiting horses on which they make their final escape.But the film is best known for a shot completely tangential to the narrative, in which actor Justus D Barnes, as the leader of the gang, expressionlessly points his revolver at the camera and fires six shots at point blank range. The shot is usually placed at the end of the film, after the character has been killed on screen, but Porter suggested it could also be re-edited as the opening shot if distributors preferred. It's a striking image of violence directed at the audience, but there are now no reports of screaming and ducking as with the Lumières' train.Far from being 'realistic', the shot, and the film as a whole, exemplify the growing tendency of cinema to exploit the vicarious thrill of danger and violence in a contained, safe space. The image is cinema's second enduring icon after Méliès' moon, and has been much parodied and homaged, most notably in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, with Joe Pesci's psychotic gangster standing in for Barnes' outlaw. But in the later film it's actually the penultimate shot. It's followed by a view of the narrator, Ray Liotta's police informer, smiling smugly at the camera before retreating into the comfortable suburban home he occupies under his new identity, safe in the knowledge that the bad guys and their guns are now illusions, locked in their cel(l) of film.

preston_peace Many films back then and especially now are kind of sloppy. I don't mean that in a bad way. My favorite films are messes. Mostly because it gives a little heart to the film and little themes are scattered throughout the films. However, The Great Train Robbery is one of those messes that manages to be deep, beautiful, scary, and in some weird way, focused.The film in a nutshell is a train robbery committed by four robbers. They go through the steps of the robbery of a train and it ends- well, I don't want to spoil it. Now, by 1900s standards, this must've been horrifying. In this film, the viewer witnesses brutal murders, constant shootings, and a guy literally shoots the camera. Film was barely thirty years old. Movies were still being shown in tents and people were still ducking out of the way if they saw something move even close to the screen. But the people making this film knew that. They wanted people to be scared. They wanted their minds challenged. And that's what this film is, a challenge.The film isn't about the robbers or the cops, good vs. bad, or order vs. chaos, it's about bad people doing bad things and how they would go about doing that bad thing. In other words, the movie isn't about the particular person, it's about the robbery itself. The people who die in this film are because of that robbery, not because bad people do bad things, but because bad people need to eat, and a train robbery is a good place to find cash.The film, as a whole, is very simple. Because of this, when something happens in this in this film, you know that something's "happened". It's a great work of art.

Doug Kamm This is a fun, silent film. I feel it is a very complete and compelling story of its time which brings to life the concept of train robbers & legions of the time. As far as the technical side of things, I really enjoyed the use of camera-work. The use of the different camera angles and locations of the film really makes it interesting. I also enjoyed the use of additive coloring. I did feel that it was a tad slow for my taste but I shouldn't be too critical because it came in out 1903. For silent films that I've seen, I felt The General & Nosferatu are a little smoother but considering that those both came out 20 plus years later that would be an unfair judgment. All in all, though it is a good film and I give it a 6 out of 10.