Great Film overall

Best movie ever!

I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Black Diamond Express (1896)This Edison short lasts less than thirty seconds and basically shows some men working on a railroad track. The title refers to an actual train but that isn't really seen anywhere in the film. As you'd expect from a movie of this era, there's really not any story or plot but instead it just shows us a part of life as it was in this period. I've always enjoyed watching these older films just because they can show you the land as it was back in the day or how things were done. Obviously with such a short running time there's nothing with great detail but you at least get to see how work on the railroad was done.

William Heise, the veteran cinematographer from the Edison Film Company's earliest years, and James H. White, the relative newcomer to Edison, both worked on this short. It was Edison's first attempt at the burgeoning train genre in silent film.It starts with several men working on the track. In the distance you can see a train making its way towards the camera. As it approaches, the men step off of the track. You can feel the speed of the train as it takes the bend. On-lookers and the riders on the train wave flags towards each other. Though not as good as Lumiere's 'Arrivee d'un train', it is still one of Edison's better early shorts.

Just watched this very brief depiction of a train coming as railroad workers striking on tracks start to leave as the locomotive comes nearer. At only 26 seconds, at least that was the length on Internet Archive, this was another fascinating document from the nineteenth century as captured on film from The Edison Company. Supposedly, many in the audience that were watching a moving picture for the first time also ran away as the train on the screen went toward them as had happened in France when a similar image was depicted earlier on screen as filmed diagonally by the Lumiere brothers. Well worth a look for anyone interested in early cinema.

Footage of moving trains made up one of the most popular genres in the very earliest years of motion pictures, and the Edison movies featuring the "Black Diamond Express" were far from the only movies of their kind. Much of their interest now lies in comparing them with the other features of the same type.The most famous and memorable of all such movies is still the Lumière feature, "Arrivée d'un train …", made the year before Edison started making the Black Diamond Express series. The composition in the Lumière feature, with the train coming in diagonally relative to the camera frame, is still the classic shot and the most effective perspective. The Edison features, though, were made more in competition with other American-made movies of trains.Like most of the features in the Edison series, this one shows the train coming straight on, rather than at a diagonal, creating a different, simpler effect. One other difference is that it catches the train at its peak speed in mid-journey, rather than as it approaches a station. Thus the sensation of pure speed is a little greater, though at the cost of a much less aesthetically pleasing camera angle.This movie is supposed to have produced the same kind of dramatic effect on its first US audiences as the Lumière feature did in France, and you can see why. Although it does not have the masterful sense of composition to be found in the Lumière features, it succeeds well enough in accomplishing its primary goal of conveying a sense of speed to its viewers.