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THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY 103
the express safe, kill the messenger, force the passengers to stand in line, rob them. Meanwhile, the agent’s little daughter, bringing supper in a dinner pail, discovers the crime. She cuts her father loose. He notifies the sheriff. There follows the “pursuit scene” grown since so conventional. Finally the posse surrounds the bandits, who fight to the death behind fallen horses. When the last man has rolled over dead, the film seems logically finished. But no — onto the screen springs a close-up of the Bandit Chief, masked and menacing. He draws his revolver and discharges all its chambers at the audience.
I saw The Great Train Robbery during its first run in vaudeville, and it appealed mightily to the little boy in me, so that I have remembered it all these years. Last year I saw it again, and it still had a thrill — especially that final scene, which to-day any jury of censors would condemn without leaving their seats.
Vaudeville was then the approved outlet for a new film. The Great Train Robbery had run on all the circuits to the great profit of its producer, and now, at reduced prices, was being peddled among the little fivecent store shows in the humbler tenderloins of our big cities. Watching it through two performances, Adolph Zukor hatched an idea.
Terry Ramsaye, who has observed his peculiarities for many years, has noted that when Zukor thinks things out, he works off his superfluous energies by