Friday 10th July

The Great Train Robbery

Director: n/a
Year: 1903
Stars: n/a

Having been influenced to find out where the gangster genre began by watching The Killing earlier this evening, Dan and I were led to this 1903 film, The Great Train Robbery. Admittedly, it is only 10 minutes long, but upon watching it you begin to realise how many of the things we think of as inventive and different in modern cinema are anything but. You can see the origins of a lot of them right here.

Being such an old movie, it's freely available to watch on YouTube. The quality isn't great (what were you expecting? It's over 100 years old), but it is worth watching. It focuses on, you guessed it, a train robbery - starting off with tying up the station master and ending the way all great gangster movies do (if you don't know how that is, you really need to go and watch a couple of gangster movies).

Considering this film is only 10 minutes long, it's amazing how much of it has stayed with me. It's hard to rate this as it's so different to films as we know them today, but the fact that it has contributed massively to so many modern films, and that this is still recognisable today, means I can only really give it 5 stars.

Rating: 5 out of 5

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About Me

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I live in Bristol with my husband Dan (who I married in July 2007), my son Joe (born 2012) and daughter Jess (born 2015). I work at UWE (the University of the West of England) in Bristol as a Research and Open Access Librarian. I'm orginally from Exeter, so moving back to Bristol is a bit like coming home - especially as I studied for my undergraduate degree here (also at UWE). I love travelling and movies, although I get to do a lot less of both since the birth of our children. Although we have still managed to fit in holidays to the Isles of Scilly, Chamonix and a summer in California since Joe was born.