How sad is this?

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Edwin S. Porter made one of the most important early films "The Great Train Robbery". Some have referred to it as the first full-length film, though Georges Méliès made his "Voyage Dans Le Lune" the same year and a couple other films also claim to be the first. Regardless, it was a huge milestone in film history and was the first great American western. So, it's not at all surprising that Porter would seek to capitalize on this success--though I am surprised it took him two full years to get to "The Little Train Robbery"."The Little Train Robbery" is a parody of his previous film--and it IS unusual for a person to parody their own work. In this case, you have a similar plot but it's acted by kids. And, as they are kids, they ride ponies and the train is an amusement park type they'd have for the young kids. It's a clever idea BUT it's also an idea that runs thin--even when full-length meant 10-20 minutes as it did in 1905. In many ways, it's a lot like the much later (and dreadfully awful) "The Terror of Tiny Town"--the first all-midget western! So is it worth your time? Not especially. But, if you love early films and have already seen "The Great Train Robbery", it's worth a look.

Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Company is remembered primarily for two things: 1) ripping off the competition whenever possible (done best today by TV's SciFi Channel, but pioneered as a profit-maximizing technique by light bulb inventor Edison), and 2) suing the competition for ripping YOU off (for which Edison's film company was particularly notorious; while point #2 seems on the face of it to be in conflict with point #1, Edison hired the finest legal minds of his day, and they knew that under the American legal system, the litigant with the most money wins 99 percent of the time; if that party also is the most ballyhooed, the victory rate is upped about another percentile). However, occasionally Edison's henchmen contributed other innovations to the film industry, as is the case with THE LITTLE TRAIN ROBBERY (1905). Herein, the Edison crew pioneers the idea that if sex and violence is the top seller for the grown-ups, why not hook the young 'uns on the same while their tender brains are being formed and wired? This worked, of course, which is why modern cinema is as it appears today.

Edwin S. Porter, who also directed the groundbreaking Great Train Robbery in 1903, returns here to the same story but changes all of the villains from adults into children. It's not a bad idea (beating Alan Parker by some 70 years) and works surprisingly well, not only as a cute parody of the original film but as a tale in its own right of desperate villains breaking the law and attempting to evade capture.The film opens with the crook's mastermind issuing instructions to the gang. We then see them riding off to the railway line where they lay a few planks over the line then lie in wait for their victims, the passengers of one of those miniature trains for kids. Having knocked out the driver - who later recovers and wanders into shot when it appears he wasn't supposed to as he looks at the camera for a moment before diving to the ground - the robbers relieve the tiny passengers of their valuables and head back to their hideout where they share out the spoils - bags of sweets. Unfortunately, they don't get much chance to sample their booty before the police appear on the scene and give chase.Although this is quite a good film for its time it still falls far short of the kind of standards that would prevail only a few years later. Editing is confined to changing shot when the predefined action has been completed rather than to create excitement or tension, and there is no use of close or medium shots.

In spoofing his own hit movie, Edwin S. Porter produces a fairly creative parody that is worth seeing in itself, and that is perhaps even more interesting in historical terms. "The Little Train Robbery" is a re-working of the classic "The Great Train Robbery", with all the characters changed to children, and most of the settings miniaturized accordingly.The story often parallels the original quite closely, and the more familiar you are with the original, the more similarities you can spot. So this is more than just one of the era's common remakes of the one-shot films that had become popular - it involved a detailed look at the original movie, with many choices as to how closely to follow it. It is certainly one of the most detailed examples of this kind to be found in the first decade or so of cinema history.There are also times when, in contrast to the original, details are changed to play up the fact that the characters here are all children. As such, it is interesting in terms of the age-old debate as to how far behavior, especially of the young, might be influenced by the movies. Attitudes always change from one era to the next, and not always in the same direction. Attitudes in past eras were not always as simple as we may assume them to have been, and this is the kind of example that provides an interesting perspective on the issue.Seen simply as a movie, this is not one of the best of its era, but it has some clever features, and it still works well enough. To the audiences of the time, to whom "The Great Train Robbery" would have been one of the very best movies they had ever seen, there would probably have been noticeable interest in this parody version.