Plot
The film opens with two masked bandits breaking into a railroad telegraph office, where they force the operator at gunpoint to stop the train and give the engineer orders to fill the train up at the station's water tank. Afterwards they knock him out and tie him up. As the train stops to fill up, the bandits, now four, board the train. While two of the bandits enter an express car, kill a messenger and open a box of valuables with dynamite, the others take out the engineers, halt the train and disconnect the locomotive. The bandits then force the passengers off the train and ransack them of their belongings. One passenger tries to escape, but is instantly shot down. Carrying their loot, the bandits escape in the locomotive, later stopping in a valley to continue on horseback.
Back in the telegraph office, the operator wakes up and tries to escape, collapsing again. His daughter enters and restores him to consciousness by throwing water in his face. He goes to a nearby dance hall to gather assistance, and the men grab their guns and pursue the bandits. The posse catches up with the bandits, and in a final shootout all of the bandits are killed.
Read more about this topic: The Great Train Robbery (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)