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Butch And Sundance Train Robbery Directly Inspired This Film


THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY(1903) can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.

It was Anderson, not Porter, who came up with the idea for the milestone 14-scene, 10 1/2-min. grand-daddy of all movie Westerns (filmed during November 1903 in New Jersey). Anderson got the idea from a true event that occurred 3 years earlier on 29 August 1900, when outlaws Robert LeRoy Parker[aka Butch Cassidy], Harry Longabaugh[aka The Sundance Kid], and two others halted the No. 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks near Tipton, Wyoming. The bandits forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train and then blew up the safe in the mail car to escape with about $5,000 in cash.

Thus, motion picture cinema's very first cowboy hero GILBERT M. ANDERSON began his rise. In Edwin S. Porter's landmark THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY(1903), the part of the head bandit was played by mustachioed Justus D. Barnes, who appears at the end of the film and points a gun at the audience and fires (which was Anderson's original idea to Porter for a publicity stunt for the film). Upon its release on 1 December 1903, a lady in the audience had actually fainted as a result. Anderson was actually the assistant director/second unit director of this milestone Western. It was Anderson who contributed the action-packed elements to the film. Edwin S. Porter was nearly dumbfounded when he found out that Anderson conned him about being an experienced horseman: Anderson barely knew how to ride. Porter had Anderson play three different parts in the film:

Scene 6 - Anderson is the only held up passenger who tries to make a run for it and gets shot in the back by one of the train robbers.

Scene 9 - Anderson is the 4th train robber who accidentally drops then picks up his sack of stolen loot while crossing a creek; initially, Anderson tries to mount his white horse on the wrong side; he also shows a little uncertainty while very slowly mounting his white horse as the 3rd train robber waits for him.

Scene 11 - Anderson is the tenderfoot who enters the dance hall where the cowboys (soon to become a posse) fire their six-shooters near his feet forcing him into an impromptu dance.

Scene 12 - As the 4th train robber making a getaway along with his gang, Anderson falls off his horse while being pursued by the posse firing shots. His fall was unintended and not in the synopsis, but he managed to regain his footing and somewhat awkwardly improvised by pulling out his six-shooter and waves it around before pretending to be shot dead, transforming this virtual blooper into a believable scene. That is why the last member of the posse stops and shows great concern at Anderson lying there still. This person wasn't acting at that moment but was genuinely concerned for his assistant director/second unit director's personal safety! Anderson's 4th train robber character was originally supposed to get killed along with the rest of his gang in a shootout after dismounting.

However, Anderson made sure to quickly master horse-riding after this experience. In 1907, he founded the Essanay Film Company & Studio with partner George Kirke Spoor. One source attributed Anderson as being bossy and impatient, while Charlie Chaplin, in his autobiography, described him as "vague and erratic".

Anderson invited his mentor Edwin S. Porter to join his film company, but Porter was still loyal to his boss inventor Thomas Alva Edison. However, for old times sake, Porter obliged Anderson and directed Essanay Studio's THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN COWBOY(1908), which Anderson wrote, produced and starred in. This was the last Porter-Anderson cinematic collaboration; their professional relationship has its parallel decades later in the Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood collaborations. Edwin Stanton Porter's [birthname Edwin Stratton Porter] contribution to cinema was that instead of using abrupt splices or cuts between shots, he created dissolves and gradual transitions from one image to another.

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The Wild Bunch seems to have made the most obvious reference to this film in the train robbery scene.

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