Not a theme, but it’s kinda identifiable as a Western by the hats.
Going on my personal interpretation of an action film as one made up primarily of set pieces involving fights, chases, crashing of various vehicles and of course explosions, and leaving aside the The Great Train Robbery and some of the silent-era films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, I was going to nominate Burt Lancaster’s mid-60s classic The Train. Yeah, I know it could be classified more as a war film, but there’s an additional problem: at least three James Bond film pre-date it, so to be fair I’d probably have to go with Goldfinger as the first (modern) pure action film.
I can see an argument for both the aforementioned Thunder Road and North by Northwest, but for me they are more dramas with action elements, although I’m not sure I could go to the mat in support of that interpretation.
I like your thinking. The “drama with action elements” aspect of the pre-Bond movies makes it hard to locate something as “balls to the wall” as the Bond franchise.
I haven’t had the patience to go through the IMDb by-year Action genre lists, looking for one I remember as having as much mindless action as the Bond movies, but your mention of The Train (1964) – which I only vaguely remember and which I confuse with other train things like Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and Runaway! (TV 1973) – and which IMDb categorizes as
– makes me pretty sure I could locate some pre-Bond movie that would satisfy maybe 60% of Action Movie fans as having a large number of action sequences, thus making the movie border on an Action Movie.
Thanks for the nudge! I may go on that search through IMDb after all. 
Aside from train sequences to rival car chases, what other substitutions do your think apply before an Action Movie loses its appeal or drifts off into another category or sub-genre? That border between Thriller and Action/Adventure can be very fuzzy at times, depending on who’s doing the labeling. Sometimes the label is just plain ridiculous!
Thinking about this a bit more, what about King Kong (1933) and Gojira (1954), which were both pretty clearly made as pure spectacle and feature plenty of satisfying destruction?
No doubt about the Action, for sure, but don’t they creep into the Creature Feature or Monster genre enough that that would be the label for them?
If it isn’t clear yet on my major concern with this thread, it’s trying to locate the earliest movie that could reasonably be labeled Action (in preference to other equally appropriate genre labels like War, Spy, Western, Thriller, Gangster, you decide) and with that label would appeal to a majority of present-day Action Movie fans as being accurately labeled.
To review, this thread was a spinoff from another ongoing thread that’s looking for a list of Action Movies to put into a poll for Best Action Movie since 1990. I was just wanting to satisfy myself, with the help of you kind people, that such a thing exists. I am convinced we have a good case for the early 60’s. Now the chore (as I see it) is to move that date further back into the past.
I didn’t respond upthread to
but Seven Samurai (1954) Shichinin no samurai (original title) which IMDb labels
satisfies most of my own personal criteria for Action. Worth thinking about. And one of the All-Time best movies, regardless of accurate label.
Yeah, definitely. The opening sequence where Kambei shaves his head and saves the child has become an action movie staple - introducing the hero by showing him doing something unrelated to main plot to establish his integrity and/or awesomeness.
ETA: Forgot to mention the whole concept of “assembling a crack team of badassess to do something badass.”
Ah, can’t believe I forgot La salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) (1953), listed by IMDB under ‘thriller’ but arguably fitting the bill as an Action Movie, certainly for its second half at least.
Yep, that’s my final answer.
Well, I have yet to see The Wages of Fear (1953) Le salaire de la peur (original title) but Netflix says:
So I will try to get that watched online soon. Thanks, El_Kabong! This may move the timeline back another decade.
Although Pink Panther (1963) and What’s New Pussycat (1965) are comedies I’ve often thought action movies stole a lot of their tropes from them.
You have a good point, and it might even extend back to cartoons! That might make for another excursion into trivia: what was the first Action Cartoon? 
10-to-1 it’s on YouTube!
Nice work! Who can top that?
I’m gonna throw in a thought on maybe the first made-for-TV action movie – 1971’s Duel, Steven Spielberg’s directorial debut. Very good film. The next one I can think of was a couple of years later, Birds of Prey, starring David Jansen as a traffic helicopter pilot.
Taking these one at a time:
I would classify King Kong as a Fantasy. But putting aside the Dinosaurs and Giant Ape, I still wouldn’t call it an Action movie, it would be an Adventure movie. The difference being in an Action movie the hero’s conflict is with another person or people while in an Adventure movie, the conflict is with Nature and/or the elements.
Godzilla would be a Monster Movie which probably deserves to be a genre of its own (KK too I suppose) but you can argue that. Beyond a Monster movie, it is Science Fiction.
Thanks for that. That was one of those differentiations that I could subconsciously make but couldn’t quite put into words.
Do Serials count? They often had a lot of vehicle explosions, fistfights, and gunfire…
No doubt there was Action, but I would personally refrain from calling a serial an Action Movie. Action Serial, perhaps?
The sad thing is that if you were to try to splice a serial’s episodes together to make a longish movie, you’d have to cope with the fact that you’d have to choose which version of the “ending” of one episode was redone as the “beginning” of the next. Nine times out of ten they’d be noticeably different! 