1903 - The Great Train Robbery

Title: The Great Train Robbery

Release Date: 1 December 1903

Director: Edwin Stanton Porter

Cast: AC Abadie, Gilbert M "Bronco Billy" Anderson, Marie Murray, Mary Snow, Justus D. Barnes, Frank Hanaway, Walter Cameron, John Manus Dougherty Sr.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000439/

My Rating: (10/10) ★★★★★★★★★★

Widely accepted as the first film to solidify the Western genre, The Great Train Robbery accomplished a lot more than that. I will quote Tim Dirks review because he really sums it up completely.

The film used a number of innovative techniques, many of them for the first time, including parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement. Jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places. The film is intercut from the bandits beating up the telegraph operator (scene one) to the operator's daughter discovering her father (scene ten), to the operator's recruitment of a dance hall posse (scene eleven), to the bandits being pursued (scene twelve), and splitting up the booty and having a final shoot-out (scene thirteen). The film also employed the first pan shots (in scenes eight and nine), and the use of an ellipsis (in scene eleven). Rather than follow the telegraph operator to the dance, the film cut directly to the dance where the telegraph operator enters. It was also the first film in which gunshots forced someone to dance (in scene eleven) - an oft-repeated, cliched action in many westerns. And the spectacle of the fireman (replaced by a dummy with a jump cut in scene four) being thrown off the moving train was a first in screen history.

What I like most about this film is that it still carries with it the shock and entertainment that you have to imagine the early audiences were responding to. Gunfights, saloons, chase sequences, booty, trains, foot chases, senseless murder, a damsel in distress, an incredible final shot....it has everything a good western ougha have! And its only one reel long!