100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #123: The General (1926)

Directed and Screenplay by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman

How does one start to describe Buster Keaton? He’s generally cast as one of the great “clowns” of the silent era, which is why you’re reading about him as part of this series of reviews. But that term has always undersold Keaton. He deserves a place alongside Chaplin and Lloyd as a comedy legend, to be sure. But he also ranks alongside Ford and Hitchcock as the greatest directors to emerge from the era of silent film, full-stop.

“Clown” was a fair term to apply to Keaton when he made his debut as a show-stealing protégé of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in 1916. The films Keaton made with Arbuckle were the sort most people come to mind when they use the term “silent comedy”: broadly slapstick and somewhat coarse. Keaton arrived ready-made for this type of filmmaking. He had been inducted into his family’s traveling vaudeville act shortly after his birth in 1893. “The Three Keatons” (mother, father, and Buster) relied on what some might call “physical humor,” and what others might call “throwing a young child around a stage for laughs,” a point Keaton’s father would often debate with child welfare authorities. But while no one would have confused Keaton with a fine dramatic actor, the style he perfected in music halls and tent revivals in the days prior to sound amplification was a perfect fit for the world of silent cinema as it existed in 1916. His practiced stoicism in the midst of chaos, honed in this act, was to be his trademark for a lifelong career in showbusiness.

By 1920, when Keaton struck out on his own as an actor and director, his apprenticeship with Arbuckle had made him a nearly complete filmmaker. (Arbuckle’s immense promise as a filmmaker was derailed by accusations, never proven in court, that he sexually assaulted a young actress at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco in 1921.) The first “Directed by Buster Keaton” two-reelers are remarkable for their polish and ingenuity. COPS features a breathtaking set-piece in which Keaton is chased by hundreds of police officers around Los Angeles; THE PLAYHOUSE demonstrates his complete mastery of special effects and cinematography by manifesting nine Buster Keatons onto the screen at a time, an incredibly difficult effect to achieve when cameras were cranked by hand. In ONE WEEK, the best of the Keaton shorts, a physical structure becomes a character unto itself, as well as the backdrop for a pitch-perfect comedy about a young married couple. (The film ends, as it turns out, with a gag involving a train). Keaton’s acting, stunt work, technical mastery, and clever scenarios made his short films consistent winners at the box office, and they hold up incredibly well for modern audiences. (My young children, aged six to two, adore these movies.)

Keaton quickly reached the limits of what could be achieved in a two-reeler, and he needed a feature film format that would give full expression to his talents. Hitchcock identified the “suspense” film early in his career and never looked back; Ford had a similar focus on war, history, and Westerns. But Keaton was restless. Between 1920 and 1926, he had directed a parody (THREE AGES, a spoof on Cecil B. DeMille’s epic INTOLERANCE), a screwball romantic comedy (SEVEN CHANCES), a costume “drama” (OUR HOSPITALITY), a wistful “movie about movies” in which he plays an Inspector Clouseau-like detective (SHERLOCK JR.), a comedic western (GO WEST) and a comedic sports movie (BATTLING BUTLER, about boxing). But throughout these genre experiments, Keaton was honing in on the most elusive of Hollywood beasts: the summer blockbuster. The formula is simple: an action-packed, exciting plot. Incredible special effects. Hundreds, if not thousands, of extras. Thrilling stunts. Romance. And, yes, a good deal of humor, too.

He found the perfect alchemy in an epic story of war and romance in the South, just over a decade before David O. Selznick found the same combination irresistible and moved heaven and earth to make GONE WITH THE WIND. Keaton plays Johnny Gray, a railroad engineer in Georgia (the movie takes its name from his train) who is not allowed to enlist for the Confederacy because the draft board believes he is more valuable running the trains than fighting on the front lines. His failure to enlist creates division with his sweetheart, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), and her family. A year later, Yankee spies seeking to lay the groundwork for an offensive in Georgia steal Johnny’s train and kidnap Annabelle Lee during a routine trip. Johnny, inspired more by love of his train than anything else, borrows another train and strikes out alone to chase the Yankees down.

Keaton based this scenario on real-life stories of espionage actions conducted via train theft during the Civil War. (In order to appeal more broadly to American audiences at the time, he made the protagonist a Southerner, reasoning that Northerners would not mind watching a Northern defeat, but that Southerners might think they were having their noses rubbed in it if the story was told from a Union perspective.) The story likely had personal appeal to him on multiple levels. He had the mind of a mechanical engineer, and his genuine understanding and appreciation of trains is palpable in this film. Keaton also put his filmmaking career on hold to enlist in the First World War, so he had a personal sense of the emotions and realities surrounding war.

Filmed on location in rural Oregon, THE GENERAL represents Keaton’s greatest achievement in cinematography and direction. He was completely committed to making THE GENERAL an authentic portrait of the Civil War, down to the buttons on the uniforms of the extras. The result is a film in which every shot looks like a Matthew Brady Civil War photograph from the mid-1860s. Modern, digitally restored prints of THE GENERAL finally do Keaton’s camerawork justice, and if you ever have the opportunity to see this film in a theater (hopefully with an orchestra), prepare to be amazed. 1920s audiences didn’t have lower expectations for movies than we have; it just so happen that after decades of neglect of silent film, technology has allowed us to recapture the magic of films like THE GENERAL.

Which brings us back to the question of what THE GENERAL is, exactly. To be sure, THE GENERAL is a Keaton comedy, and it is very funny. Most of the physical humor comes in the form of Keaton’s daring stuntwork. THE GENERAL also shows off Keaton’s great facility with other types of humor, including slapstick, clever sight gags, cute romantic tiffs, and witty one-liners. (Yes, even in a silent comedy, Keaton manages to get off a zinger.)

Moreover, the film is structurally sound in a way that amplifies the laughs. The first half of the film shows Keaton chasing the Yankees to get his train back; the second shows the Yankees chasing Keaton along that same track in an effort to apprehend him. Along the way, nearly every significant incident, stunt, or gag in the first half of the movie finds an echo in something that happens in the second half of the movie, in reverse order. This parallel structure gives the film a lilting, rhythmic quality arising from its many variations on a central comic theme.

Notwithstanding Keaton’s demonstrated mastery of the craft of comedy, THE GENERAL has never struck me as Keaton’s funniest movie, in part because of its strange juxtaposition of comedy with war and death. It is not a silent comedy about war, but a war film that happens to be quite funny. Audiences at the time seem to have agreed the film did not meet their preconceived notions of Keaton as a silent clown. THE GENERAL saw underwhelming returns at the box office, and Keaton never attempted a film as ambitious again. It was the beginning of a slow decline in Keaton’s fortunes. After making a few more strong films as an independent (COLLEGE and STEAMBOAT BILL JR.), Keaton signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1928.

Charlie Chaplin warned Keaton that signing with MGM would end his independence and kill his career. Chaplin was right. Keaton’s filmmaking style did not comport with the regimented “studio system” that held sway at MGM. He made one indisputably great film with MGM, THE CAMERAMAN, but it was all downhill from there. Beset by frustration with MGM’s way of doing business, a rocky transition away from silent filmmaking, and the deterioration of his first marriage, Keaton turned to drinking, and his career declined sharply. After leaving MGM and bottoming out professionally, he eventually found stability in his life and, bolstered by the rediscovery of his films and a renewed appreciation of his importance to the history of film, he found consistent work in showbusiness until his death in 1966. He lived long enough to see THE GENERAL become known as not simply his greatest achievement, but as one of the greatest films ever made in any genre.

So if I had to pick the funniest Keaton comedy, I’d probably go for SEVEN CHANCES, or the two-reeler ONE WEEK. But if I had to pick Keaton’s best movie, the choice is easy. THE GENERAL is the work of a master craftsman who spared no detail or expense to transport the viewer into a different time and place, a splendor to behold and a joy to watch nearly a century later.