The Great Train Robbery (1903 film) in the context of "Location shooting"

The Western is a film genre defined by the American Film Institute as films which are "set in the American West that [embody] the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier." Generally set in the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, the genre also includes many examples of stories set in locations outside the frontier – including Northern Mexico, the Northwestern United States, Alaska, and Western Canada – as well as stories that take place before 1849 and after 1890. Western films comprise part of the larger Western genre, which encompasses literature, music, television, and plastic arts.

Western films derive from the Wild West shows that began in the 1870s. Originally referred to as "Wild West dramas", the shortened term "Western" came to describe the genre. Although other Western films were made earlier, The Great Train Robbery (1903) is often considered to mark the beginning of the genre. Westerns were a major genre during the silent era (1894–1929) and continued to grow in popularity during the sound era (post–1929).

A threat is a communication of intent to inflict harm or loss on another person. Intimidation is a tactic used between conflicting parties to make the other timid or psychologically insecure for coercion or control. The act of intimidation for coercion is considered a threat.

Threatening or threatening behavior (or criminal threatening behavior) is the crime of intentionally or knowingly putting another person in fear of bodily injury.

Justus D. Barnes (October 2, 1862 – February 6, 1946), named George Barnes in some sources, was an American stage and film actor. He is best known for his role in the 1903 silent short The Great Train Robbery, which the American Film Institute and many film historians and critics recognize as the production that first established both the Western and action genres, setting a new "narrative standard" in the motion picture industry. Kim Newman says it is "probably the first Western film with a storyline".

Edwin Stanton Porter (April 21, 1870 – April 30, 1941) was an American film pioneer, most famous as a producer, director, studio manager and cinematographer with the Edison Manufacturing Company and the Famous Players Film Company. Of over 250 films created by Porter, his most important include What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City (1901), Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), Life of an American Fireman (1903), The Great Train Robbery (1903), The European Rest Cure (1904), The Kleptomaniac (1905), Life of a Cowboy (1906), Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1913).

Scott Marble (1847 – April 5, 1919) was an American playwright who wrote the 1896 stage melodrama The Great Train Robbery which in 1903 was made into a film of the same name that later would be regarded as a classic movie Western. For the female impersonator George W. Munroe he wrote the play My Aunt Bridget (1886); a work which had a lengthy national tour in vaudeville in the late nineteenth century. His other plays include Tennessee's Pardner (1894), The Sidewalks of New York (1895), The Cotton Spinner (1896), The Heart of the Klondike (1897), and Have You Seen Smith? (1898), On Land and Sea (1898), and Daughters of the Poor (1899). The composer Richard Stahl wrote the book for the romantic opera Said Pascha which originally was produced at the Tivoli Opera House in San Francisco in 1888.

Marble was born in Pennsylvania in 1847. He moved to the Chicago area circa 1878 and worked there as an actor in the 1880s. He and his wife, actress Grace Marble, had four children. He died in New York City, on April 5, 1919.