The Story of the Kelly Gang

The Story of the Kelly Gang
Poster for film's 1910 re-release
Directed by	Charles Tait
Produced by	William Gibson Millard Johnson John Tait Nevin Tait
Written by	Charles Tait John Tait
Based on	possibly the play The Kelly Gang by Arnold Denham
Starring	Elizabeth Tait John Tait
Distributed by	J & N Nevin Tait
Release date	December 26, 1906 (1906-12-26)
Running time	1,200 m (4,000 ft) – approx. 60 min
Country	Australia
Language	Silent
Budget	£1,000 or £400
Box office	£25,000

The Story of the Kelly Gang is a 1906 Australian silent film that traces the exploits of 19th-century bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly and his gang. It was directed by Charles Tait and shot in and around the city of Melbourne. The film ran for more than an hour with a reel length of about 1,200 metres (4,000 ft), making it the longest narrative film yet seen in the world. It was first shown at Melbourne's Athenaeum Hall on 26 December 1906 and premiered in the United Kingdom in January 1908. A commercial and critical success, it is regarded as the origin point of the bushranging drama, a genre that dominated the early years of Australian film production. Since its release, many other films have been made about the Kelly legend.

In 2007, The Story of the Kelly Gang was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register for being the world's first full-length narrative feature film.

Australian bushranger Ned Kelly had been executed only twenty-six years before The Story of the Kelly Gang was made, and Ned's mother Ellen and younger brother Jim were still alive at the time of its release. The film was made during an era when plays about bushrangers were extremely popular, and there were, by one estimate, six contemporaneous theatre companies giving performances of the Kelly gang story. Historian Ian Jones suggests bushranger stories still had an "indefinable appeal" for Australians in the early 20th century.

The Story of the Kelly Gang was made by a consortium of two partnerships involved in theatre—entrepreneurs John Tait and Nevin Tait, and pioneering film exhibitors Millard Johnson and William Gibson. The Tait family owned the Melbourne Athenaeum Hall and part of their concert program often included short films. Melbourne film exhibitors Johnson and Gibson also had technical experience, including developing film stock. Credit for writing the film scenario is generally given to brothers Frank, John and sometimes Charles Tait. At a time when films were usually shorts of five to ten minutes duration, their inspiration for making a film of at least sixty minutes in length, and intended as a stand-alone feature, was undoubtedly based on the proven success of stage versions of the Kelly story.