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:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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