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New Jersey's scenery was to be a substitute for the West for a good many years after The Great Train Robbery. The westerns didn't really go West until 1910.
That The Great Train Robbery was almost accidentally a good film shouldn't be held against it; in fact, quite to the contrary, it has frequently been praised for things it just didn't do. It has been called the first story film (which it wasn't), the first "feature film" (at nine minutes it was hardly that! ) and the first western, which, in a manner of speaking, it was. Certainly it was the first film to establish the basic "horse opera" pattern of crime, pursuit, and capture. It even foreshadowed the shape of much later westerns, such as Jesse James, by placing the stress on the outlaw rather than on the law; there was no individual hero in The Great Train Robbery at all. More accomplished films had undoubtedly been made before 1903, but to my knowledge no film had so successfully combined good story-telling with good direction and good technical work.
Produced for the Edison company, it was practically a one-man show. Edwin S. Porter wrote, produced ( the word then covered directing as well ) , and photographed it. Porter was primarily a technician, and the film has some extremely able effects— superimposition, stop motion, and so on, as well as far more imaginative camerawork than was common at that date. The astonishing thing is, however, that Porter had stumbled on to the secret of film construction and editing without really knowing it; Porter put it together the way a good story-teller would, changing locale, building to an exciting climax, cutting from one scene to another. To Porter this must have seemed just common sense. Obviously he couldn't have understood the possibilities
of his work or have been capable of developing them further. Curiously, The Great Train Robbery, which earned him overnight fame, was to remain his best picture. In the following years, his pictures remained steadfastly on the same level; and what was new and inventive in 1903 was already old-hat by 1908. And by 1914, when Porter directed Mary Pickford in the feature Tess of the Storm Country, his technique hadn't progressed one iota, and the film was so outdated as to be beyond belief. But his failure to develop into a top director (perhaps the top director, since he'd had an edge of several years on both Griffith and Ince ) didn't seem to worry him, and he went happily back to what he knew best— the purely mechanical side of the business.
For a short and simple little action film, The Great Train Robbery stills holds up surprisingly well. It keeps on the move. Its horseback chases, the robbery on the train, and the fight atop the coal tender, are still exciting if not completely convincing. In a realistic sense, the film was in any case rather defeated by the obviously inaccurate cowboy clothes, the painted interior sets, and the inadequacy of New Jersey (the film was shot around Dover, New Jersey ) to represent the wild, untamed West. But until Griffith's The Adventures of Dollic in 1908 it remained probably the single most important motion picture made anywhere; and in retrospect, with the western going stronger than ever, it even overshadows that first directorial effort of Griffith's.
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