The General (1926)

Official trailer

The General is among the greatest films ever made. Buster Keaton directed it with Clyde Bruckman. Keaton stars as Johnnie Gray, a Western and Atlantic Railroad engineer in Marietta, Georgia at the start of the Civil War. The script is loosely based on the Andrews Raid of April 1862, in which Union spies stole a Confederate locomotive named the General and tried to drive it north destroying track and bridges as they went. The historical event was a Union failure.

The film recasts it as a comedy from the Confederate side and turns the train chase into seventy-five minutes of escalating physical comedy. Watching Keaton ride the coupling rod of a moving locomotive makes me laugh and wince at the same time. I adore this film. It’s funny, it’s gorgeous, and every stunt in it is real, and very little made since can say that.

The film was a commercial failure on release in 1927. Audiences and critics didn’t know what to do with a Civil War comedy in which the Confederacy was sympathetic and the entire third act was elaborate train stunts. It nearly destroyed Keaton’s independent producing career. By the 1950s critical opinion had reversed completely. By the 1970s The General was on most lists of the greatest films ever made. By now there’s little serious dispute.

The Stunts

Keaton did all his own stunts. The film contains shots of Keaton sitting on the coupling rod of a moving steam locomotive, balancing on the cowcatcher, jumping between cars, and running across the top of a moving train. There were no cuts to cover the stunt work. The audience sees him doing the actual things at actual speed.

The climactic sequence destroys a real steam locomotive on a real burning bridge.

The film blew up the Texas, a working engine, by driving it through a collapsing trestle bridge into a river. The single shot cost approximately forty-two thousand 1927 dollars. That was the most expensive single shot in American silent film history. The engine remained in the river for years before being salvaged for scrap during the Second World War.

That bridge collapse is the shot I’d save if I could only save one from the silent era. A real engine goes through a real trestle into a real river, nobody cuts away, and I sit there stunned that anybody had the nerve to bet the budget on a single take.

The Comedy of Competence

Johnnie Gray is good at his job. He’s an excellent engineer. He can work the train under any conditions, repair mechanical problems while moving, and execute precise maneuvers on track that’s barely holding together. The comedy isn’t that he’s incompetent. The comedy is that he’s competent at his job and being heroically resourceful in service of objectives that events outside his control constantly undermine.

This is the Keaton character. The audience laughs because the man on screen is treating an impossible situation with complete professional seriousness. The seriousness is the joke. The audience knows the situation is absurd. Johnnie doesn’t, and he keeps solving problems.

Keaton’s stone face is why I laugh so hard. He never asks me to find him funny. He just keeps fixing the train, and the harder the world pushes, the more serious he gets.

The Confederate Problem

Johnnie Gray is a Confederate. The film doesn’t address what the Confederate cause was. The Civil War in The General is a setting in which a train chase can happen, not a conflict the film cares to take sides on. Critics have argued about whether the film’s casual Confederate framing is morally neutral or actively bad. The case for neutral is that the film is from 1926 and was made in a popular culture that didn’t yet treat Confederate sympathy as a problem.

The case for bad is that the film doesn’t justify its silence about what the protagonist is fighting for.

I think The General is a great comedy that’s also a 1926 Hollywood film in its politics, and both things are true. The Confederate framing is a blemish whenever the uniforms show up. It doesn’t cost the film a point with me, because the film has no interest in the cause and every interest in the train.

Does The General still hold up?

10/10. The physical comedy has no equal I know of, the train stunts can’t be reproduced, and Keaton makes shots that look like they could kill him seem easy. My one quibble is the Confederate framing, and it doesn’t come near touching the number. It flopped in 1927 and built its reputation the slow way, and I think it deserves every bit of it. Watch it on the largest screen you can find.

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