What would you call Die Hard, if not an Action Film?
Granted that it would be hard. That’s my biggest stumbling block going further back than the 60’s.
I’d even say that there are elements of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) or even The Wild One (1953) that knock on the Action Movie door, but which are easily dismissed as Teenager or Hoodlum flims, or something equally dismissive.
“Crime” or "Thriller"or perhaps even “Suspense”.
I’ve heard Battleship Potemkin - Wikipedia (1925) as the first “Action Movie”.
beaten to the punch
What would you call Commando, if not an Action Film?
I am posting from my Droid, so searching is clumsy. Is " Alexander Nevsky " older than Potmkin ?
If not Great Train Robbery, perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_of_a_nation
I’d go with Action, but I could see a Blockbuster (staffed by drones) with a War section or a Special Forces section or something down that trail where you’d have to look for it. Could be part of why Blockbuster sleeps with the fishes.
BTW, does anybody deal with the Red Box alternative to Netflix? How do their categories work?
A slasher flick (warning: incredibly gory)
Did anybody else have a Monty Python and the Holy Grail moment there?
War - I don’t think a film needs to take place in a war for that catagory. If it has soldiers and military weapons in it, I think it qualifies.
Okay, y’all. Bending the definition of “action” just a bit, to coincide with puberty mentality, what about The May-Irwin Kiss (Edison, 1896)?
I’d think only the last 15 minutes could count as “war” and that is a very loose definition of the “war” genre
Fair enough. I’ve never seen Commando; I was just going off of the Wiki summary which made it sound like there was a lot more combat involved.
This is the one that I immediately thought of when I saw the thread title. And for those who say that action films need car chases, how many fucking cars were around in 1903? And for those that say that it is a western, it may be set in the west, but it is about a train robbery. It isn’t about driving cattle, it isn’t about settling the great wide expanses, it isn’t about trekking across the country to settle the west or find gold in California. It’s a train robbery. Robbing trains is all sorts of action.
I challenge anyone to find one other single theme of a classic western in that film.
*The Great Train Robbery * is often the answer to any “first” question about cinema.
To assist in that search for other “Western” themes, here’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) Full COMPLETE Original Film RESTORED
Western??? Hell, it was shot in New Jersey !!!
The landscape photography, and the mounted gunfight, certainly look like they influenced later Westerns. As to whether the film is a Western or not, it’s a category that gets pretty fuzzy at the edges. I would call it one personally.
Thanks Zeldar for the link, I’d heard of the film before but never watched it. Never thought to look on Youtube…