It wasn’t the first Western, despite many claims to the contrary, and it wasn’t the first movie with a complete narrative. But no one disputes that “The Great Train Robbery” was a landmark both for moviemaking and for the way we remember the Wild West.
Released in 1903 and filmed in the least Western locations you could imagine — New York and New Jersey, which was then the studio capital of the world — the silent movie “The Great Train Robbery” fused many of the relatively new filming and editing techniques of the time to make it an instant classic. In 1990, the Library of Congress made it official by adding it to the United States Film Registry.
Here’s the entire film “The Great Train Robbery”:
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