What Was the First Feature Length Biopic?

Film is often thought of as humanity’s memory because it records our lives and stories, so it is ironic that relatively little is known about film history itself. For example, one of the most important films in the entire history of cinema, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), is barely known at all, even among so-called film experts or buffs. Yet its historical importance cannot be denied. It is not only the first biographical film or biopic, but the first feature-length film of any kind and, arguably, the foundation of what is often called the ultimate cinematic genre—the Western.    

What Is The Story of the Kelly Gang?

Biopics have long been a staple of cinema and continue to be so today, as proven by Oppenheimer (2023) winning the Best Picture Oscar and Maestro (2023), a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, being among its most prominent challengers. Yet if you were to ask a film fan who the subject of the first-ever biopic was, they would almost certainly be wrong. It is not Jesus, Shakespeare, or anyone else who might immediately spring to mind, but an Irish-Australian criminal who wore what looked like a bucket on his head.

That, of course, was Ned Kelly, a “bushranger,” an Australian term originally used to describe escaped convicts but later extended to include any criminals who hid out in the country’s scrublands or bush. Kelly, his brothers, and friends embarked on a crime spree at the end of the 19th century before a violent shootout with police that killed the rest of his gang, and led to his arrest and execution. Almost immediately, Kelly became a mythical figure, the so-called “Robin Hood of Australia.” And within a quarter of a century of his death in 1880, Kelly became the subject of the first-ever biopic, made anywhere in the world. That was The Story of the Kelly Gang.

‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ (1906)

The unique historical status of The Story of the Kelly Gang was attested to by the United Nations itself in 2007 when it was entered on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register as the world’s first full-length narrative feature film. The film ran to nearly an hour, or five reels of film, which was unheard of in the early 20th century. At that time, most films were just shorts that ran for a maximum of 15 to 20 minutes or a single reel of film.

It is precisely because The Story of the Kelly Gang was the world’s first feature film that it is so disappointing that very little of it survives today and in very poor condition. At least that fragment survives after it was thought for many decades (indeed, until the 1970s) that the whole film was lost. Thankfully, an extensive restoration process has ensured that at least that fragment survives, giving us some idea of what the whole film would have looked like.

What survives of The Story of the Kelly Gang is available to watch online. It is, of course, silent. Indeed, it is not just silent but what might be called “early silent,” in that the intertitles or subtitles that would later become so commonplace (and explanatory) in silent films are largely absent. So, for a 21st-century viewer, even one accustomed to watching silent films (especially, later silent films with more intertitles or subtitles), it can be confusing at first. Eventually, however, the sheer simplicity of the narrative—it is a classic “cops and robbers” story, with supposed villains being chased by the police—makes itself clear.

Based fairly faithfully on actual events, the film opens by introducing the gang, naming the different members one by one, beginning with the bearded (and, at this point, bucket-less) Kelly. All the members of the gang possess the two essential components for a bushranger and a bushranger film, namely a horse and a gun.

Then, we are shown “The Kellys’ home,” where a uniformed policeman is waiting to arrest the Kellys. However, an altercation ensues, during which the policeman is shot, and the Kelly gang, Kelly included, jumps on their horses and heads for the bush.

The gang is pursued by other policemen who want justice, if not revenge, for the shooting of their colleague. Various adventures ensue, including the holding-up at gunpoint of several people at a house that the Kellys invade. And the action culminates in a dramatic shoot-out. The gang is trapped in a hotel, which is set on fire by the pursuing lawmen to flush them out, and only Ned survives.

Kelly is finally captured, wearing his iconic bucket helmet, which in reality was part of a homemade suit of armor that he had constructed to try and prevent himself from being shot. He is surrounded by policemen and brought to his knees. Kelly’s “head” of armor is removed, and he is led away to what the original audiences, especially in Australia, would have known was his certain death.

‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ (1906)

It must be emphasized that the quality of the surviving film is patchy at best and virtually unwatchable at worst. Indeed, as the film progresses, the condition of the film (and it was actual chemical film, which was naturally susceptible to distortion or even catching light) increases blurring or distortion, culminating in Kelly’s capture by the police. This final scene is almost totally distorted, so much so that the viewer is left wondering what the police are doing to Kelly. Are they exacting revenge for their wounded colleague or even torturing him? Until that distortion is somehow undistorted, we will never know.

The Story of the Kelly Gang Is the First Biopic

The Story of the Kelly Gang is the first biopic, or, at the very least, it is the oldest such film that survived. What is particularly fascinating is that it exhibits many of the defining qualities of a biopic that are still evident in biopics today, over a century later.

The first and most important element, of course, is that The Story of the Kelly Gang is a film about a real person and one whose name and story were already familiar to most of the people watching, especially in Australia, where it was first shown before being distributed overseas. There had been several Australian films about bushrangers before, but The Story of the Kelly Gang was the first to be based on a named, known individual. And that undoubtedly played a huge part in its initial success, because the film had “name recognition.”

‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ (1906)

Before The Story of the Kelly Gang, almost all films, wherever they were made in the world, were about particular incidents or situations, typically robberies or other crimes and the chases that followed, or they were even what might be called “reality cinema;” as the Lumière Brothers proved, such was the sheer novelty of film when it first appeared that it was possible to exhibit films of trains entering stations or factory workers leaving their factory.

By the time The Story of the Kelly Gang was made, there was an appetite for films about actual people who told their true stories. This is where The Story of the Kelly Gang is also emblematic of so many biopics that have followed.

Read More: Real Drama: Scripts You Should Read If You’re Writing a Biopic

Perhaps it was not so much the criminality of Kelly and his gang that fascinated the makers of The Story of the Kelly Gang, who were largely made up of two theatrical families who had performed in plays about the gang before they told their story on film. Instead, it may have been the fact that criminals were necessarily men of action, forced to survive by their actions rather than their thoughts or words, that made them perfect for cinema, especially silent cinema.

The story may have been basic, but the fact is that The Story of the Kelly Gang established many of the tropes of the biopic: characters who were simple to understand and obviously in conflict with each other; seemingly ceaseless action, as the robbers engaged in robberies or escape attempts, all the while being pursued by the police; and ultimately the final act/final reel shootout in which the criminals, including their leader, are brought to justice at last.

At the end of The Story of the Kelly Gang, there is the film’s defining and enduring image, which of course was the defining image of Kelly, namely his “bucket-head” helmet of armor. In an extraordinary act of verisimilitude, the filmmakers borrowed the actual helmet that Kelly had worn, which came into the possession of an aristocratic family after his execution. The fact that Kelly dons that helmet right at the end before it is wrestled off him by the policemen surely contributed to the film’s initial success. 

Even if the original audiences, especially those outside Australia, did not know exactly who Kelly was, they had in mind that mental image of the helmet before they saw the film, and then they saw that image for real on the screen.

‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ (1906)

… and the First Feature Film

In addition to being the first biopic, The Story of the Kelly Gang was also the first feature film, as acknowledged by UNESCO and the film historians who helped to compile its Memory of the World Register.

Consequently, it proved that there was an appetite for films about real people, and for films about real people that ran for a considerable period of time.

Of course, as already mentioned, that is why it is so frustrating that so little of the original film survives. In addition to the restoration of the film, there has been a further restoration program involving all the physical materials that surrounded it, including programs, cast lists, and stills. It is by studying, restoring, and ultimately incorporating all of this other material that the restorers of The Story of the Kelly Gang have been able to suggest, first, the storyline of the whole film and, secondly, the key scenes and sequences that have been lost.

‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’ (1906)

Chief among those lost scenes is what would undoubtedly have been its most spectacular set piece, which was the Kelly gang attempting to derail an oncoming train by lifting (literally lifting by hand) the track. Contemporary reviews and the memoirs of the filmmakers themselves suggest that this scene or sequence would have been genuinely spectacular, but, alas, it has not been seen since the first decade of the last century.

Nevertheless, the fact that such a scene or sequence existed at all, even if it is now lost, is another way in which The Story of the Kelly Gang was genuinely ground-breaking. The filmmakers realized that, especially if they were asking people to sit and watch a film for much longer than they were used to (and to pay accordingly), they had to give them more “bang for their buck” (or dynamite for their dollars). The “lifting of the rail” sequence in The Story of the Kelly Gang would have been such a spectacular sequence, surely thrilling its original audiences, and it laid the ground for every action sequence that followed it, right up to Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle over a cliff in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023).

Read More: What Was the First Movie Ever Made?

… and the First Western

Finally, in addition to being the first biopic and the first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang might have an even more impressive claim to fame, namely that it is the first Western. 

At first glance, that seems counter-intuitive, because, as the name of the genre suggests, the first Westerns are usually thought of as emanating from the Wild West or, more prosaically, the untamed West Coast of America, especially Hollywood. However, many Australian film historians convincingly argue that the first Westerns, or even proto-Westerns, were shot in Australia, suggesting that the genre should be called “Southern” and not Western.

The earliest Western film of any kind is thought to be Kidnapping by Indians (1899), which was made in the North of England, and it is celebrated as such at the end of The English (2022), the sublime TV mini-series about the Wild West and Native Americans. However, it is what would now be called a “micro-short” because it is only one minute long. 

Longer shorts with similar subject matter were made thereafter, especially in Australia. However, it was only with The Story of the Kelly Gang that the first Western or Western-like feature appeared.

All the ingredients that came to define the Western as arguably the ultimate cinematic genre and in particular the most American of all cinematic genres are there in The Story of the Kelly Gang: a criminal gang going on the run; the gang hiding out in the bush, or wilderness; and the inevitable and fatal collision with the police, as the law (indeed civilization itself) sought to make its presence felt in a wild and wide-open land.

Read More: 10 Great Westerns That Brought the Western Back During Their Time

The Story of the Kelly Gang Is One of the Most Important Films in History

It is the combination of all these characteristics that make The Story of the Kelly Gang so historic. In addition to being the first biopic, it was definitely the first feature film and arguably the first-ever Western feature film.

Consequently, although it may lack the artistic excellence and indeed artistic integrity (i.e., it has not survived intact) of such classic films as Citizen Kane (1941) or La règle du jeu (1939), it is arguably even more important. Like all the early films that preceded it, from Louis Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) to the Lumière Brothers’ La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon) (1895), The Story of the Kelly Gang is one of what might be called the earliest cave paintings, or even cave filmings, of cinema. Like all those earliest films, it has provided the basis for all the cinema, and, in particular, all the biopics, features, and Westerns that have followed.

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