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THE GENERAL
by Buster Keaton
No less than (titan of cinema) Orson Welles called Buster Keaton’s sprawling epic “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made”. If that’s not a good enough reason to watch then further down the page you’ll find more.
Synopsis: During the American Civil War, Union spies steal an engineer’s beloved locomotive and he pursues it single-handedly, straight through enemy lines.
With his athleticism, precision and comic timing, Keaton more or less invented the action film with ‘The General’ and, despite a modest runtime, it has epic ambition and scope.
REASONS TO WATCH
– Buster Keaton’s favourite of his own films.
– Keaton’s sensibility and persona, adapt better to the modern viewer’s sense of the world’s cruelty, absurdity and randomness. For example, Chaplin’s socially conscious and humanist comedy, posits a world of clear right and wrong, where there is a place for an ultimate justice. Although both Chaplin and Keaton were remarkably gifted physical performers, Keaton’s gags rely on a combination of his amazing physical abilities with the technical side of Cinema – editing, pacing, camera placement.
– In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #18 Greatest Movie of All Time, Premiere voted this one of “The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time”, included on Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” list, and is included among the “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die”.
– The scene in which the locomotive crashes through the bridge was the single most expensive shot of the entire silent movie era. It remained in the river until WWII, when it was salvaged for scrap iron.
– Keaton’s last independently produced film and in many ways presents the apotheosis of his style. As can be seen in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ years later, Keaton and his work steadily declined after that due to outside interference and public indifference.
NOTES
Based on a true incident during the Civil War. In April 1862 Union agent James J. Andrews led a squad of 21 soldiers on a daring secret raid. Dressed in civilian clothes, Andrews and his men traveled by rail into the Southern states. Their mission was to sabotage rail lines and disrupt the Confederate army’s supply chain. At the town of Big Shanty, GA, (now known as Kennesaw, Georgia) the raiders stole a locomotive known as “The General.” They headed north, tearing up track, burning covered bridges and cutting telegraph lines along the way. William Fuller and Jeff Cain, the conductor and engineer of “The General,” pursued the stolen train by rail and foot. They first used a hand-cart (as Buster Keaton does in the film), then a small work locomotive called “The Yonah,” which they borrowed from a railroad work crew, and finally a full-sized Confederate army locomotive called “The Texas,” which pursued “The General” for 51 miles–in reverse. During the chase Confederate soldiers were able to repair the sabotaged telegraph wires and send messages ahead of the raiders. Andrews and his men were intercepted and captured near Chattanooga, TN, by a squad of Confederate troops led by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest (who, after the war, was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan). Tried as spies, Andrews and seven of his raiders were hanged (a special gallows was built to hold all eight men). The rest of the raiders were traded in a prisoner exchange. In 1863 the survivors of the mission were awarded the first Medals of Honor (Andrews and the raiders who had been hanged later received the medal posthumously). Although this film is a comedy, the incident was later filmed by Walt Disney as a drama, The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), with Fess Parker–a Southerner, born in Texas–as Andrews
There is politics present in the film, however, Johnny’s motivations for stopping the Northerners are solely to impress Annabelle and to save his other “love”, The General. Johnnie and the conspirators switch uniforms, roles, and levels of competency so fluidly that any conventional notion of valour, heroism or even rightness of purpose is undermined. Keaton expert Noël Carroll points out that the film is divided into roughly two parts. In the first Johnnie pursues The General and everything goes wrong. In the second section, where Johnnie pursues the Northern gang, many of the same situations and circumstances are revisited, this time with Johnnie in complete control. He argues The General deals with, “The most recurrent themes in Keaton’s narratives and gags: the question of mastering and understanding causal relations in a world of things, on the one hand, and the question of correctly locating and precisely orienting oneself within one’s environment on the other hand”.
Johnnie’s success and the union raid’s failure do not have any moral significance. Beyond the genius of the jokes and the exhilaration of his cinematic technique, Keaton’s great insight into modern life is that values are relative and subject to change, and are also based on the silliest of human vanities and the flimsiest whims of chance.
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Enjoy the film!