The General (1926)

 

The General is the big Buster Keaton movie.  While the iconic shot from Steamboat Bill Jr. is his most famous, this film is his best-known and most well-regarded overall.  The first time I saw it, I wasn’t quite sure why, since it didn’t strike me as nearly as funny as much of Buster’s work.  Like Our Hospitality, though, it has a softer humor that becomes more evident on rewatch, and regardless, it’s an excellent movie that makes incredible achievements for its time.

 

Inspired by a true story, The General is an ambitious Civil War comedy (probably not too many of those around.)  Buster’s character Johnnie Gray is an engineer with two loves:  his girl Annabelle and his locomotive the General.  When war breaks out and Johnnie is turned down by the Confederate army – he’s more useful to them as an engineer, but they don’t actually tell him that, so he’s left wondering why the army won’t take him – Annabelle assumes he simply refused to join up and wants nothing to do with such a coward.

 

Things go from bad to worse when a group of Union soldiers make off with the General in a plan to sabotage Southern rail and telegraph lines.  Having lost his girl, Johnnie isn’t about to lose his train, too, and he sets out to recover it.  If, along the way, he happens to thwart the North’s plan, save Georgia, become a war hero, and rescue Annabelle (come on – like a bunch of Northern soldiers aren’t going to kidnap Buster’s girl,) even better.

 

For a movie that’s about 80% chase scenes (with Johnnie taking turns pursuing and being pursued,) it keeps things fresh with all manner of good train gags.  From Johnnie’s attempt to singlehandedly follow a train with a handcart to tricky business with shifting tracks to the inevitable car detachment with one of Buster’s feet on each car, there’s plenty to entertain.  From the way Buster climbs and runs around all over the various trains in the film, you’d think it was the only way he traveled.  Many of the stunts here are less acrobatic than what we see in his other films, but he makes up for it with the danger of performing them on a moving train.  That Buster, always going the extra mile.

 

But if you know anything about this movie, then you know why it’s the big Buster Keaton film:  it’s the one with that scene.  Buster Keaton’s The General, a.k.a. Buster Sends a Real Locomotive Over a Real Cliff After Really Setting the Bridge on Fire.  It’s the single most expensive shot of the entire silent film era.  The reactions from the actors who see the train go over are genuine, because Buster didn’t tell them what was going to happen (brave move, since he obviously wouldn’t be able to do any retakes.)  In a way, it’s a great image to sum up Buster as a filmmaker.  He had a superb imagination and was wonderfully inventive and mechanically-minded enough to realize his vision.  He did things no one else did, and first and foremost, he was amazingly bold. 

 

Warnings

 

Slapstick violence, mild war scenes, and a bit of unfortunate sexist humor.