A trio of bandits force a stationmaster to stop a train, tie him up,
hop onto the train, shoot the guard, steal the moneybox on board,
disconnect the engin from the waggons, rob the passengers and then get
away by using the engine. A great plan, but unfortunately, the
stationmaster is found and untied before he's supposed to, and he alarms
the authorities, and while the bandits are still busy counting the money a
posse surrounds them and ultimately shoots them all dead. A
milestone film that's by and large credited for inventing editing and
therefore inventing narrative cinema as such - despite the fact that most
of at least the latter credit should go to George Méliès's Le
Voyage dans la Lune from a year earlier. Having invented editing
and cinematic storytelling or not though, The Great Train Robbery
was successful in putting basic plot elements and ground rules of the
Western and action cinema to film, and even if the film might feel a bit
dusty today (quite opposite to the fresh Le
Voyage dans la Lune), if nothing else it's a great (and pretty
well-made for its time) precursor of things to come. Weirdly
enough, of the whole movie that stood at the beginning of narrative
cinema, only its most famous scene, the cowboy shooting straight at the
camera, makes no sense at all.
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