December 7, 1903: "The Great Train Robbery" Premieres

December 7, 1903: The Great Train Robbery premieres in vaudeville houses. It is a Western, produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company, which was run by Thomas Alva Edison. It is directed by Edwin S. Porter, and stars Justus D. Barnes, Walter Cameron, and Gilbert M. Anderson, better known as "Broncho Billy," the 1st movie action hero, Western or otherwise.

It was the 1st American feature film to have a real plot, following the French film A Trip to the Moon the year before. The plot gets wrapped up in just 13 minutes. Filming was done the month before, at the South Mountain Reservation in West Orange, Essex County, New Jersey, near Edison's laboratory.

The plot is pretty much summed up in the title: A team of bandits forces the stoppage of a train, they rob it, and make their escape to their horses. A posse catches up to them, and the bandits are killed in the ensuing shootout. The film ends with Barnes, despite his character having bitten the dust, firing his gun straight into the camera. It's a blank, of course, but Porter wanted to give the audience the sensation that they were being fired at.

The film was a runaway success, and inspired lots of parodies. Porter even made one himself, in 1905: The Little Train Robbery, with children robbing candy and dolls from a miniature railroad car. The final gun-to-the-camera scene was copied by Martin Scorcese with Joe Pesci for the end of Goodfellas in 1990. It's also been suggested that Maurice Binder's "gunbarrel sequence" openings to the James Bond films are an homage.

Another American film titled The Great Train Robbery was made in 1941, but, aside from also being a Western, it has no connection to the 1903 film. The 1963 robbery of a Royal Mail train in Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, England, was called "The Great Train Robbery." In 1855, there had been a robbery near London that became known as "The Great Gold Robbery," and in 1978, a British film was released about it, titled The First Great Train Robbery. In America, it was released with the shorter title The Great Train Robbery, but had no other link to the 1903 film.

Edwin S. Porter lived until 1941, Walter Cameron until 1942, Justus Barnes until 1946, and Gilbert Anderson until 1971.

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December 7, 1903 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. Basketball barely existed, and hockey had only started to become professional. So there were no games on this historic day.

At the end of the month, the Ottawa Hockey Club, a.k.a. the Silver Seven, and later renamed the original version of the Ottawa Senators, began challenges for the Stanley Cup, which they successfully defended.