What was the first movie in cinema history to feature a murder?
In the dramatic arts, there’s ultimately nothing more dramatic or artistically desirable than a murder executed to perfection. After all, drama, in its bare essence, is conflict. It could be the dichotomy between the twin carnal pursuits of love and death posited by Sigmund Freud or simply our attraction to the most heinous and horrifying acts imaginable. In any case, our preferred artistic means of resolving a conflict seems to be one person killing another.
From the theatrical performances of Ancient Greece to the tragedies of Shakespeare and Goethe, murders have played an integral part in some of the great dramas in literary history. And so, when the motion picture arrived in the late 19th century, it was only natural that works of narrative fiction photographed and projected onto a screen would pick up where the theatre had left off. In fact, the cinema offered more scope for illusion and visual realism than other art forms had ever been able to provide, affording filmmakers the opportunity to present murders more sensationally and graphically than anything seen before.
Not that film started out showing the kind of blood-and-guts killings popularised by exploitation cinema, particularly following the arrival of cheap colour negative film reels in the late 1950s. Just as big-screen shows became a mass form of entertainment in the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood introduced the Hays Code, banning the depiction of graphic imagery at the movies. Nevertheless, murders still took place on screen, especially when it came to the murder mystery genre, with WS Van Dyke’s After the Thin Man and the original series of Sherlock Holmes films being prominent examples.
In any case, there were dozens of pre-code movies which got away with murder. Most notably, the 1932 crime film Scarface, which was based on the life of Al Capone and inspired the 1983 remake with Al Pacino. But the first case of a movie featuring an on-screen murder occurred a full three decades before Scarface, in 1903.
So, was the film called?
The very first film to show someone being murdered was a 12-minute silent-era heist movie called The Great Train Robbery. It was one of the earliest works of Edwin S Porter, the head of production at Thomas Edison’s New York studios from 1900.
As its title suggests, the movie depicts the robbery of a train by four outlaws across several scenes. First, they attacked the operator of a telegraph office before boarding the train that had been stopped. They then shoot the express car guard dead and blow open the train’s safe, stealing its contents. And on top of the train’s locomotive carriage, one of them bludgeons the fireman to death and throws him off the side. A passenger is later shot trying to escape the robbers, but it turns out they survive. And finally, the outlaws themselves are killed in a forest when they’re ambushed by police.
Overall, then, there’s a considerable amount of deadly violence for the first movie ever to feature a murder. And the murder of the train’s fireman is particularly brutal. In general, we can say without hesitation that cinematic violence has become far more graphic since the time this film was released. However, it’s not always the most outwardly lurid scenes that have the most striking and terrifying emotional impact. And parts of The Great Train Robbery stand the test of time as examples of blood-curdling on-screen brutality.
