The Story
The story of this film is of 4 robbers, with a plan. We open on a telegraph office, a train looming through the windows on approach. Two men burst through the doors, guns drawn and they force the telegraph operator to give the train a false message. I have to confess an ignorance of the role of telegraphs to trains, but it seems that the message got the train to stop at a nearby water tower, where the robbers are concealed. After the engineer refills the train with water, the robbers sneak on board. The train pulls away.
We next cut to the trains mail carriage, a guard hears something suspicious and locks a valuables box, throwing the key out of the open door. The robbers force their way through the door and the guard valiantly tried to fend them off in a shootout but is killed quickly. The lack of a key does not trouble the four, they blow the lock and sieze the contents of the box.
Next they make their way to the engine, catching the attention of the fireman, who climbs out onto the coal box to wrestle with one of the robbers. He is beaten down and thrown from the speeding train. Sorely outnumbered, the driver does not fight, but brings the train to a stop. The robbers unload all of the passangers, shooting dead one man who tries to run, and load all of their valuables into a bag.
Their work complete, they decouple the engine and make their escape with the driver held at gunpoint. They later bring the train to a halt at a predetirmined spot in the woods and make their escape on horses tied up close by.
Meanwhile, the telegraph operator, left tied up is trying desperately to free himself. He does so with help from a little girl - his daughter, assuming he lived in the telegraph house - who heard the commotion of him falling. He manages to reach a bar, where a raucous party is in full swing. The men form a possee and ride down the lookout and then the rest of the robbers, slaughtering them in the woods where they are hiding.
The final scene portrays a robber looking straight at the camera, he points his gun down it, right at the viewer and pulls the trigger several times.
The Visuals
The film portrays a believable world, and the audience is shown it in wide angle, usually set back from the action in a long shot, showing the full environment. The one exception is the last shot, the medium shot of the bandit who fires the gun at the camera.
The Sound
The version I watched was a completely silent version, only the clicking of the projector is audible. Interestingly, after a minute or so, I turned the volume down, but immediately turned it back up again, as without that projector noise, I felt the film lost something.
What I learnt
The Story
The story is gripping in this film, from our very first scene. As the two bandits burst through the telegraph operators door, we can see the approaching train through the window. As it slows, we know they are on the verge of discovery, and they manage to hide just in time - yet at no point are they hurried or stressed. We can tell, from the level of choreography in this scene, that these are no chancers, these bandits know their trade and pull off this part of the heist with professional perfection.
Likewise, this is reinforced as we see the bandits hiding around the water tower - they wait until the driver is back in the engine before sneaking aboard, and once again they get on just in time but with no fuss. The first sign of any hiccup in their plan is that the guard in the mail carriage hears their approach, yet they deal with the situation, they are ready for most setbacks it seems.
They fail in the end, but it is difficult to see how they could have ever succeeded - the telegraph operator was always going to be found at some point, and the possee was always going to ride them down, so the story seems to tell a tale of highly skilled robbers who died because their luck just ran out, an inevitability perhaps, or perhaps knowing this, the reason why they tried to take such a big score, and leaving them free from their life.
Another element of the story revolves around the possee themselves, they are not good guys either. We see them force a man to dance by shooting at his feet before they get the call, they are morally barely better than the bandits. They also gun down the bandits without calling for surrender after getting the jump on them, though this is perhaps less black and white than that - we know they are cold blooded killers, and would have have certainly turned guns on the possee.
The Visuals
What I liked most about the visuals is how dynamic the locked down, static wide shots are with clever cinematography. The first scene, for example, once again my favourite builds a fantastic tension in it, despite quickly establishing how good these criminals are, we still feel tense as the guard from the train leans through the window while they hide. Their movement around the scene was fantastic too, they moved like silk around a frightened telegraph officer.
The film made use of special effects too, as the beaten fireman gets hurled from the train, a cut replaces him with a dummy, and despite the obviousness of the special effect, it is still effective.
Also, despite portraying such a downbeat world, death scenes are fantastically over the top, characters who get shot throw their arms into the air and writh as they fall to the floor - this stylization adds a great comic flourish to some quite dark material, and makes the serious business of murder a fun element to the movie, and allows the audience to enjoy what they are seeing. It is, I think important to include light hearted moments in even the darkest of material, that contrast makes it palatable and helps give context to the darkness. In this film, it humourises the darkest moments and keeps the film within the bounds that Porter desired, without preventing him from having killing in his film.