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Sat 6 September 2025 17:15, UK
Pinpointing the precise moment that the American action movie, as a concept, first came into being is more difficult than it sounds. Thankfully, Guillermo del Toro has a theory.
The 1980s was the decade that the action movie became crystallised into the gem of chinzy brilliance we know and love today. The muscled, bulging biceps and sweaty, rippling torsos of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger began shooting and blowing up everything around them, and with it, the notion of the genre was firmed up.
They were soon joined by other gun-toting, high-kicking stars like Bruce Willis, Jackie Chan, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the genre evolved from there.
However, while these films screamed “action”, they weren’t the first movies to contain elaborate action sequences that thrilled audiences. After all, action has been a part of cinema since the very beginning. Who could forget all those westerns with rootin’ tootin’ shoot ‘em ups between cowboys and Indians? What about all the gunfights and slugfests in cop movies or gangster pictures? We also can’t forget about all the swashbuckling pirates and fantasy heroes who crossed swords over the years, or the heart-in-mouth stunts performed by Buster Keaton.
From this perspective, it’s almost impossible to lay a finger on any one picture and say, “That’s the first American action movie.” If you say it’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, someone else could argue that Raiders of the Lost Ark came out the year before. If you make an argument that Dirty Harry is actually the first, an equally valid claim could be made for Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, which arrived three years earlier.
Thankfully, in this case, Nightmare Alley director Del Toro can step in to point us to the movie he considers the first of its kind. An authority on cinema of all kinds (not just the films that include monsters, ghosts, and goblins), Del Toro once claimed to own 7,000 DVDs and Blu-Rays, one of which is a 1964 war movie directed by The Manchurian Candidate’s John Frankenheimer. That film is The Train, and Del Toro is adamant it’s the first-ever US action movie.
In 2017, when talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Del Toro revealed that The Train was “curiously very influential” on Pan’s Labyrinth, his dark fantasy epic set in Spain during World War II. “It’s invisible,” he noted of the stealthy effect Frankenheimer’s film had on his own. “You don’t see how, but it is there. And there are even direct quotations in the movie.”
The Train tells the story of a French Resistance soldier played by Burt Lancaster who does everything in his power to stop a Nazi officer from successfully transporting stolen works of art to Germany. The film was loosely based on a real-life incident, although when Frankenheimer inherited the project from previous director Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde), he decided reality could be thrown out the window.
Penn wanted to make an intimate character study of what art meant to Lancaster’s character, but the star wanted to focus on the thrilling locomotive aspects of the script instead. Frankenheimer agreed, and with the budget doubled, set about delivering some of the most elaborate, pulse-pounding chase scenes ever put to film. He even crashed several trains for real, used genuine dynamite to bomb a rail yard, and threw in a completely fictional Spitfire attack sequence to make the ending as exciting as possible. In the process, he took a war film and blew it up to action movie status.
“I think that’s…one of the most perfect sort of popular entertainment films ever made,” Del Toro marvelled of Frankenheimer’s pioneering symphony of destruction. “And I think it’s perhaps the first real action movie in America cinema.”
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