The Birth of The Western

Histories of the cinema usually cite The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company in 1903, as the first Western film ever made. But it depends what we mean by a film.

?From 1894 onwards Thomas Edison produced a considerable amount of documentary footage showing scenes of Western life. Some of this material, made for projection in the Kinetoscope, featured Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West. There were also Indian scenes, shots of cowboys at work and scenic views. Two films made by the Edison Company in?? 1898 are probably the first to make the crucial leap from the actuality film, which dominated in the very early years of the cinema, to the drama film which succeeded it and upon which Hollywood was to he founded. In the first, entitled Poker at Dawson City, four people are sitting round a table playing cards and cheating. A fight breaks out. This is, however minimally, a narrative. And though only the film's title anchors it firmly to a Western setting, card-playing and fistfights were to prove recurrent motifs in the Western.

The other title from 1898 is very similar but somewhat better known. In Cripple Creek Bar-room people are drinking in a bar. When they get drunk the barmaid throws them out. As with Poker at Dawson City, it is the title which does most to establish the location. (Cripple Creek was the biggest gold strike in Colorado. Mining began in 1890 and peaked in 1901, and the Edison film is therefore contemporary with the scene it represents.) But the costumes also make a gesture towards a distinctively Western style. One or two of the hats show a cowboy influence and one character is dressed in top hat, white shirt and black coat, the traditional garb of the gambler.

There is no denying that The Great Train Robbery is a major advance on such productions. It has genuine outdoor locations (though not authentically Western ones - it was shot on the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad in New Jersey). Its narrative is far more developed. It incorporates into its ten minutes running time many of the motifs which were to become familiar to cinema audiences the world over: train robbery itself (raised to an art by the James gang in the 1870s and soon to become a perennial in Western films), some fisticuffs, a chase on horseback, a scene of a dude being forced to dance at gunpoint, and the final shootout. All that is lacking is for the cyphers who carry out the action to be developed into characters.