Why The Great Train Robbery isn't a Western.

         

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

1903’s The Great Train Robbery is often credited as being the first film in the western genre. Although it shares many conventions with the genre; including horses, trains, and bandits, it isn’t really a western, but rather a contemporary film for its time.

          Edwin S. Porter’s film was billed upon release as a, “Faithful imitation of genuine ‘hold ups’ made famous by various outlaw bands in the far west”. This is of course in the present tense. Westerns are period films dealing with the old west. The Great Train Robbery is an account of events that were still happening at the time. Train robberies were still common place in the early 1900’s, most famously the Fairbank Train Robbery of 1900 in Arizona. The film features characters dressed in styles of the time in response to actual occurrences of the time. This makes The Great Train Robbery more of a heist film than a western.

          Another argument for it being a film of its time is the number of true westerns that take place in the same time period as The Great Train Robbery’s release. These include such films as The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Shootist, and True Grit.
         A film must be working within a genre, and there were genre films of the time, such as comedy and actualities. The Great Train Robbery, a milestone in editing and filmmaking in general, isn’t one of them.