Director: Buster Keaton (and Clyde Bruckman)
Year: 1926
Run-time: 1 hr 15 min
Buster Keaton is probably my favorite silent film director, and Sherlock, Jr. and Steamboat Bill, Jr. are right up there in my all-time favorites, just under Sunset. But neither of those films have quite the prestige as The General. The last giant Sight and Sound poll in 2012 ranks that film as the 34th GOAT, with Sherlock, Jr. 20 ranks behind it. It's probably the most renowned film from my home state of Oregon.
But as much as I love Keaton, The General has always left me a bit cold. Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer during the Civil War. Due to his important job, the South won't enlist him, although he thinks it's because he's too wimpy (the common thread to Keaton's characters being a feeling of masculine incompetence). But when his girlfriend and his locomotive are kidnapped by a team of Union spies, he has to chase after them.
I can appreciate the strange elegance of the train stunts - it's certainly impressive how they took real trains and made them behave like children's toys. Like all Keaton stunts, they're far more dangerous than they appear to our modern eyes - the risks of derailment were extremely high in real life as they were in the film itself. The beautiful shot of Keaton sitting despairingly on a coupling rod was made with a real possibility that it would force him under the train.
Nevertheless the tense moments in this one don't quite land for me. Part of the reason is that the trains (realistically) never pick up that much speed. Watching trains chase each other at ten or fifteen miles an hour is just not that exciting - the chase scenes in Sherlock, Jr. and The Goat feel much faster even if they aren't. Although it might have a higher budget than any other Keaton film, I don't really see what other critics see in it, even I can appreciate it aesthetically.
There is also the uncomfortable matter that in this age many of us are ready to give up any sympathy with the Confederacy, and let that cause be forgotten. I'm not sure why Keaton wanted to tell this story (which was reportedly based in fact), but if he had switched the two sides not much would need to change, in the stunts or in the plot. In some ways, the real problem with The General is that all pageantry aside, there's nothing distinctive about the Civil War setting, except as an avenue for exploring Keaton's conceptions of courage and honor. Certainly, Keaton's characters, like Chaplin's, are never driven by any notion of loyalty or patriotism, but that makes this particular film seem a little too scrubbed clean.
Year: 1926
Run-time: 1 hr 15 min
Buster Keaton is probably my favorite silent film director, and Sherlock, Jr. and Steamboat Bill, Jr. are right up there in my all-time favorites, just under Sunset. But neither of those films have quite the prestige as The General. The last giant Sight and Sound poll in 2012 ranks that film as the 34th GOAT, with Sherlock, Jr. 20 ranks behind it. It's probably the most renowned film from my home state of Oregon.
But as much as I love Keaton, The General has always left me a bit cold. Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer during the Civil War. Due to his important job, the South won't enlist him, although he thinks it's because he's too wimpy (the common thread to Keaton's characters being a feeling of masculine incompetence). But when his girlfriend and his locomotive are kidnapped by a team of Union spies, he has to chase after them.
I can appreciate the strange elegance of the train stunts - it's certainly impressive how they took real trains and made them behave like children's toys. Like all Keaton stunts, they're far more dangerous than they appear to our modern eyes - the risks of derailment were extremely high in real life as they were in the film itself. The beautiful shot of Keaton sitting despairingly on a coupling rod was made with a real possibility that it would force him under the train.
Nevertheless the tense moments in this one don't quite land for me. Part of the reason is that the trains (realistically) never pick up that much speed. Watching trains chase each other at ten or fifteen miles an hour is just not that exciting - the chase scenes in Sherlock, Jr. and The Goat feel much faster even if they aren't. Although it might have a higher budget than any other Keaton film, I don't really see what other critics see in it, even I can appreciate it aesthetically.
There is also the uncomfortable matter that in this age many of us are ready to give up any sympathy with the Confederacy, and let that cause be forgotten. I'm not sure why Keaton wanted to tell this story (which was reportedly based in fact), but if he had switched the two sides not much would need to change, in the stunts or in the plot. In some ways, the real problem with The General is that all pageantry aside, there's nothing distinctive about the Civil War setting, except as an avenue for exploring Keaton's conceptions of courage and honor. Certainly, Keaton's characters, like Chaplin's, are never driven by any notion of loyalty or patriotism, but that makes this particular film seem a little too scrubbed clean.
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