{"id":403724,"date":"2025-09-06T22:31:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T22:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/403724\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T22:31:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T22:31:17","slug":"film-guillermo-del-toro-called-the-first-real-action-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/403724\/","title":{"rendered":"Film Guillermo del Toro called the “first real action movie”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Guillermo<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n

Sat 6 September 2025 17:15, UK <\/p>\n

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<\/a> has a theory.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

However, while these films screamed \u201caction\u201d,<\/a> they weren\u2019t 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\u2019 tootin\u2019 shoot \u2018em ups between cowboys and Indians? What about all the gunfights and slugfests in cop movies or gangster pictures? We also can\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

From this perspective, it\u2019s almost impossible to lay a finger on any one picture and say, \u201cThat\u2019s the first American action movie.\u201d If you say it\u2019s 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<\/a> for Steve McQueen\u2019s Bullitt, which arrived three years earlier.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s John Frankenheimer. That film is The Train, and Del Toro is adamant it\u2019s the first-ever US action movie.<\/p>\n

In 2017, when talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Del Toro revealed that The Train was \u201ccuriously very influential\u201d on Pan\u2019s Labyrinth, his dark fantasy epic set in Spain during World War II. \u201cIt\u2019s invisible,\u201d he noted of the stealthy effect Frankenheimer\u2019s film had on his own. \u201cYou don\u2019t see how, but it is there. And there are even direct quotations in the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Penn wanted to make an intimate character study of what art meant to Lancaster\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s\u2026one of the most perfect sort of popular entertainment films ever made,\u201d Del Toro marvelled of Frankenheimer\u2019s pioneering symphony of destruction. \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s perhaps the first real action movie in America cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still) Sat 6 September 2025 17:15, UK Pinpointing the precise moment that the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403725,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[129051,77,59868,3943,16,15,12873],"class_list":{"0":"post-403724","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-action-movies","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-guillermo-del-toro","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-world-war-ii"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115159727137211579","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}