User Reviews

This film, directed by Edison stalwart Edwin S. Porter (who would go on to make The Great Train Robbery later the same year) takes place on a train carrying a white woman and her black maid and an amorous young man played by Gilbert Anderson, the future Broncho Billy. It's a typical one-scene short with a punchline designed to raise laughs from an audience of its day but which appears very tame today. This film uses one of the same techniques used in The Great Train Robbery: the passing scenery seen through the train's window. It's quite an effective special effect for it's day but there isn't really anything else of note to see in this one.

This short comedy is a mildly interesting combination of the progressive and the dated, not extremely so in either case, but enough so that these aspects are noticeable just in watching the movie casually. The technical side of it makes mildly resourceful use of methods that were relatively new at the time.

The story features a well-dressed woman traveling by train with her African-American maid. G.M. Anderson (the same Anderson later known as 'Broncho Billy') plays a male passenger who repeatedly makes unwanted romantic advances towards the well-dressed woman. The use of the characters' races come across today as rather stereotyped, but on the other hand, the two women are portrayed as the resourceful (and superior) heroines, while the harassing male is ridiculed for his behavior.

On the technical side, it creates an illusion of motion by the window technique that was then becoming standard. The 'tunnel' sequence, while probably not a particular challenge for an experienced film-maker like Edwin S. Porter, is also done believably. Overall, it's an average one-joke film that is really of note only for the rather contrasting social attitudes that it combines.

Made the same year as The Great Train Robbery Edwin S. Porter re-boards in this one minute, one chuckle rail ride that pre-dates the erroneous breaking of a social taboo by half a century.

A woman and her maid are riding coach when she drops her handkerchief. A young rake (played by the future Broncho Billy) does her the courtesy of retrieving it but then pesters her further. The man remains persistent, the woman annoyed, the maid amused as they disappear into the darkness of a tunnel.

Porter employs his GTR matte shot technique to an impressive degree as well as create the trains feeling of movement and transition into and out of the tunnel. His players are well defined and the punch line subversively humorous, provocative and perhaps insensitive were it not that the offended have the last laugh.