Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery (1903)

Filmed in Delaware and New Jersey, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery has the distinction of launching Western film craze. Often called "the father of American story film," Porter was an early film innovator who moved film from documentary to narrative styles. He was known for introducing the element of editing into his films as a storytelling technique.

Porter based the the film on true events: a 1900 train robbery pulled off by Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch near Table Rock, Wyoming. The gang stopped the Union Pacific's No. 3 train forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train, and then blew up the mail car's safe to excape with $5,000 in cash.

The film originated many elements which have come to be clichés in Western films. It was the first film in which someone was forced to dance by someone else shooting at his feet, for example. It combined elements of Dime novels, Western theatricals, and real life adventure to spawn a film genre which came to play a central role in the development of American film.

Questions to Consider:

1) What are the elements--beyond its Western setting--which identify this film as a "Western"?

2) Does it matter that The Great Train Robbery was filmed in Delaware and New Jersey instead of Wyoming? Given that the landscapes represented as "Western" are not, what elements allow them to stand in for Western places?

3) What are the uses of violence which occur in the film? Who uses violence, and how is it treated differently depending on its user? What does this say about attitudes about the Frontier experience?

4) What traditional elements of Westerns are missing from this film? What does that reveal about the world in which it was made?

5) Can you find elements of Turner's Frontier Thesis reflected in this film?

6) What would Richard Slotkin have to say about this film?

Further Readings and Resources:

Dian McIntire's excellent brief biography of Porter, on the Silents Majority Site.

The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound Profile of Porter as a key innovator of early film.

Earl Jackson's Porter Page

Ed Wyatt's "Was The Great Train Robbery Really The First Western?"

Peter Flynn's "The Silent Western as Mythmaker," Image, Issue 6 (n.d.)

View the Film Over the WWW:

The Library of Congress's Great Train Robbery Files, available in MPEG and Quicktime formats.

WildWestWeb's streaming RealMedia of the film:

Excerpts || Part I || Part II || Part III

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for Honors 502 (American Frontiers and Borderlands), Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Saturday, 19 August 2000.